Found an old pre-17 digit VIN that I want to run a history on, but everything I have found requires 17 digits to even try to bring it up.
Is there an easy way to do this? Is there a website that accepts the short numbers? I read that the old VINs can be 'converted' to 17 digits but it gave me no way of doing it.
Usually those are brand-specific. Doing a search for something like "1964 Dodge VIN decoder" would help you decode what it actually IS, but there were no such things as history reports prior to 17 digit VINs that I know of. It would have been all paper, and likely only recorded for 10 years on a state level.
That's kind of like looking for a text message you sent in 1974. There were no text messages.
In reply to Curtis73 (Forum Supporter) :
How do states keep track of old vin cars that are still registered and driven these days? Say you had a 69 chevelle that was stolen. How do they record and verify which car it is in order to block resale attempts and catch chop shops? Modern cars are put into a national database by VIN so that people can't fence stolen cars.
One problem before 1981 was each manufacturer had their own VIN style as it were, they weren't standardized yet. Tag offices do often keep the VIN in their database but may be limited to last owner or two.
There must be a master list for stolen cars as US Customs often find cars and motorbikes that were stolen decades ago and being shipped overseas.
I wish there was a way to check old short VINs on the "Hot " sheet ,
Daeldalus said:In reply to Curtis73 (Forum Supporter) :
How do states keep track of old vin cars that are still registered and driven these days? Say you had a 69 chevelle that was stolen. How do they record and verify which car it is in order to block resale attempts and catch chop shops? Modern cars are put into a national database by VIN so that people can't fence stolen cars.
Digitally, but they don't have access to anything more than about 10 years back. There is no way to physically find every piece of paper from every state on that car and manually enter it into a database, so anything before computers doesn't exist.
For instance, I have a 1966 Bonneville and a 67 LeMans. The LeMans was owned by Duke and I think it was registered during computery times, but the only history that a VIN check could possibly produce is that it was owned by a guy named Duke and then owned by a guy named Curtis. It can't know all of the previous owners because they were on paper in god-knows-where. The Bonneville I registered in 1996, but it didn't exist before then because it had been only on paper. No computer. It had been sitting in my great uncle's barn since he died in the 80s. I then took it off the road in 1998 to make it a project.
Here's how PA does it. Back in the paper days, they kept things for ten years. If you bought a car, all of the paperwork went into a physical file at PennDOT. You continue to register it over the years. Every year they went through the files and shredded anything 10 years or older. Imagine keeping every single piece of paper in filing cabinets back to the 1920s. It would be a warehouse the size of a small planet. So they shred old paperwork. Now that we're digital, a similar thing happens. Any data file that is 10 years or older gets deleted from the DOT server, it's just that much of that data is also collected by insurance companies, dealership repair departments, banks that hold the liens, and reported to other agencies. That data is what companies like carfax use to populate a vehicle history report.
For a while I had a 65 Scout 80 that my friend found with a tree growing through it. The last registration sticker said 1982. To get a title I had to first contact DOT to verify that it didn't currently belong to someone... which of course I knew it didn't. They had zero record of it existing because the last activity on it was more than 10 years ago. I had to get a court order for the state to issue a title to me which involved a few hoops, but it wasn't that tough. But despite the Scout having a PA plate, registration sticker, old registration card, and even an old insurance card with it, the state had no idea it ever existed.
In reply to Curtis73 (Forum Supporter) :
Maybe that's the case for regular cars but I know for a fact cars that were stolen more than 10 years ago have been recovered and returned to the legal owner. So if the car has a theft history it's held somewhere and held for more than 10 years.
In the insurance world, we can't get history on pre-17 digit cars either. I run vehicle history reports on every single car I manage a claim on. Our system simply doesn't recognize those older VINs.
Curtis is right about PA. I wanted to transfer my old purple antique car tag to my 66 Falcon. It was last on a truck I owned over 15 years ago. PennDOT had no record of it, even though I still had the registration in my name. I had to send a photo of the actual tag to them before they'd issue it to the Falcon.
dculberson said:In reply to Curtis73 (Forum Supporter) :
Maybe that's the case for regular cars but I know for a fact cars that were stolen more than 10 years ago have been recovered and returned to the legal owner. So if the car has a theft history it's held somewhere and held for more than 10 years.
Correct. I don't think law enforcement ever gets rid of that kind of thing.
ddavidv said:In the insurance world, we can't get history on pre-17 digit cars either. I run vehicle history reports on every single car I manage a claim on. Our system simply doesn't recognize those older VINs.
Curtis is right about PA. I wanted to transfer my old purple antique car tag to my 66 Falcon. It was last on a truck I owned over 15 years ago. PennDOT had no record of it, even though I still had the registration in my name. I had to send a photo of the actual tag to them before they'd issue it to the Falcon.
I had personalized plates on my Impala SS when I left PA in 2000. Registered it in CA for 7 years, then TX for 4 years. When I came back to PA, I couldn't renew my plates because there was no record of them. I would have had to re-purchase a custom plate.
Daeldalus, I think the point here is that researching the history of a 17-digit VIN is easy because there is a lot of digitized information that has been voluntarily supplied to the intarwebs about the car. Prior to computers, there is a big vacuum. Unless a person went 200% Sherlock Holmes on a single car, it's doubtful you could even discover who owned it before.
I will suggest (blasphemy, I know) that you post the VIN over at the HAMB. It's a long shot, but I've seen people post just a photo of a unique car and 10 members will chime in with "that used to belong to my neighbor's kid in the 80s" and "that paint job was done by Jimbo when I worked at his body shop."
When it comes to old cars, those folks are freakishly resourceful.
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