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Auto Manufacturers Running Out Of Unique IDs
wakebrdr writes "Y2K all over again? A story in today's Detroit News explains how the vehicle ID numbering system (VIN) will soon run out of unique numbers. According to the article, a member of the Society of Automotive Engineers says, 'Longer codes would require a major overhaul of computer systems that would dwarf the challenges and expenses spawned by the Y2K computer dilemma.' Golly, if it's that serious maybe I should start stocking up on MREs and ammunition in preparation for the day the assembly lines come to a screeching halt."
The 17-digit codes that identify the origin, make, model and attributes of cars, trucks, buses -- even trailers -- worldwide will be exhausted by the end of the decade.
How about extending the allowable characters in a VIN to include certain ASCII or Unicode symbols? Perhaps make them case-sensitive? That would preserve uniqueness--at least for awhile longer--although it might make the codes harder to verbalize (i.e. to an insurance agent).
Sigs cause cancer.
Just use NAT.
"Prefiero morir de pie que vivir siempre arrodillado!"
There goes our defense system again...
Does reading "userfriendly" make anyone else around here want to strangle someone?
I would start using alphanumeric characters in the serial number field (last 6 digits), giving them 36^6=2,176,782,336 possibilities instead of 10^6=1 million. Actually maybe they already do? If so, then start using the !@#$#$%^%^&*)(*& symbols!
Any bets they will get massive government subsidies to take care of this "bigger then y2k" problem?
If anything, coders should be working on fixing that upcoming unix bug... when is it, 2012?
Detroit never heard of NAT? Routers could ID multiple vehicles using a single public VIN.
I'm not worried about the assembly lines coming to a screeching halt... I'm more worried about the assembly robots revolting and attacking the population!
*Duck and cover*
How will my Studebaker collect its hard earned social security?
The vin is from this vehicle:
VIN: 3P3ES47Y8XT528059
Year/Make/Model: 1999 PLYMOUTH NEON HIGHLINE/EXPRESSO
Body Style: Pillard Hardtop 4 Dr
Engine Type: 2.0L L4 SMPI DOHC 16V
Manufactured In: MEXICO
The Society of Automotive Engineers, which established the existing VIN system in 1981 and expected it to last 30 years, has formed a committee to address the impending shortage.
Good thing we survived the 80's so we can always point at mistakes on how not to build things to last. I really hate to see someone that points out that "It'll Last for X years" and it never does. Like IPv4, now we have IPv6 - which I can almost say for certain it will outlast most of us (IIRC it has more digits than atoms in the universe). 640k anyone, the list goes on and on. All of you as engineers have to think a little harder; did we really really save that much money when we used 2 digit dates verses 4 digits. Even into the 90's now the 00's how many use 04 are their checks - what if the Declaration of Independence just had 2-digit year? Its not like were running cat7 in the walls but now maybe there is a list long enough where we can start saying why don't we add a few spare digits for buffering.
Time for the automotive industry to recognize the limitions of VIN, ditch it, and switch to IPV6.
Seriously, I wonder why they can't switch to some type of barcode system, so the cops don't have to key in a really huge long number.
Why does the government feel that it needs to know the "ID" of my vehicle? What business is it of theirs? This is no different than other government-mandated identity programs such as Social Security numbers. Not to get tin-foil-hatty, but if you've read books like 1984 or studied leaders like Hitler, you will know that programs like this (even if they start with the best of intentions) end up going way down the slippery slope, usually with disastrous results.
Slashdotters were (rightfully) up in arms a few years back when Intel planned on embedding unique IDs into their Pentium III chips. Yet we blindly accept VINs and other intrusions into our privacy without question. Why?
My car has a seven digit number as a VIN.
I had a lot of issues getting it registered and insured, although in most cases it was just a training issue -- the people I was dealing with didn't know how to enter it correctly.
The Massachusetts RMV had no idea what to do with an odometer in kilometers though, so my title says 9,999,999 miles on it.
Perhaps this will speed the transition to VINv6...
Shades of Grayden
By that logic, the next car that rolls off the assembly line when the numbers are exhausted will be a Baker Electric.
Where does the school board find them and why do they keep sending them to ME?
The second character signifies the manufacturer (General Motors is G, Ford is F, Chrysler is C)
Why not just give GM, Ford, and Chrysler another letter? GM can have G and H, Ford E and F, and Chrysler B and C
Surely every manufacturer doesn't produce as many cars as the top few
Maybe one could use VIN numbers as SSNs: when a car "dies" recycle it's VIN number.
Just give every new car two VIN numbers - Problem solved
And a VIN shortage is "News for Nerds," how?
This is a fairly common issue in other industries as well... In the food packaging industry they use what is called a DSS number; in addition to the generic serial number we've all known to grown and hate. This DSS number is sort of an industry number which allows the manufactures to more accurately tracking where the product what packed / shipped to, etc. The system is at it's witts ends, as these DSS numbers are appended depending on the number of destinations... Turns out when they designed the system food was only being shipped to many 3 or 4 places at the most --- now it's common for food to be shipped to upwards of a dozen places BEFORE it is even shipped to the grocery store.
all in all, same story, boo hoo, it'll cost them a bunch of money to upgrade
CCTV Systems
Gamblers Forum
I'm not sure if the issue is that the VIN's can't get any longer than they already are, but I know that the VIN on an older vehicle (ie. the '60 Chevy pickup I had) is a few characters shorter than a VIN of today. I would think that lengths in between these two would be useable without any major overhaul, but what do I know?
I got a +5, Troll
The "how to read a VIN" sidebar from USAToday has an error in it. I feel all fuzzy inside now.
<grrr>
Let's see... how many manhours can a consultant charge the PHB to run the following SQL query
alter table VEHICLES modify column VIN varchar(50);
Yup.. that took countless manhours.
Since the article wasn't clear on this, and a comparison with Y2K was made.
The current VIN system is local to the US (and probably Canada, not sure). Other countries do not share the VIN system/database/namespace. Sure, the manufacturers are located all over the world, and there's a unique ID for country of manufacture, but the VIN numbering is only mandatory for vehicles in the US.
Other countries have their own numbering system (usually a chassis/SL No.), and their databases are built around their unique identifiers.
So yes, their proposed solution is feasible, because right now, there are Country codes assigned to countries which will most likely not export vehicles to the US in the near future. But the comparison with Y2K is off because of the fact that this problem is local to the US.
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
Use The Global Numbering Automobile Authenitcation (G.N.A.A.) system developped by Gary Niger Corporation back in 1970. It is capable of 17 trillion googol googalplexes worth of combinations.
More information here
I dont know about you, but my VIN already has a barcode printed on the tag, and its a couple of years old...
It doesnt address the issue of running out of numbers of course...
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Whoever came up with the the VIN system as it stands needs to be drawn and quartered. I assure you that had any engineer worth his salt been given the plan of VIN back in 1981, he wouldn't have allowed there to be the imminent shortage we face now. By simply giving the right data fields (specifically the last six) more than enough space, we would have never faced this crisis ... and I hesitate to call this a crisis ...
As a software developer for a gargantuan insurance company, let me assure you that I would be rather grumpy (to say the least) if I came into work one day and was told we have to overhaul our VIN-handling code. That would suck. Royally.
However, automakers could start mixing some alphas into the numeric vehicle-identifier portions of VINs...this could provide a few million (at least...too lazy to do math) more string combinations, and wouldn't affect the parts that IT people care about.Just once I'd like someone to call me 'Sir' without adding 'You're making a scene.'
We have a system that is potentially going to cause companies to have to upgrade their systems in order to handle a new ID scheme. I understand that companies want to save money, but eventually these things will run out and upgrades will need to be done. Would a smart move not be to bite the bullet and just produce a new numbering scheme with more longevity?
Even if I knew that tomorrow the world would go to pieces, I would still plant my apple tree. -Martin Luther
Let's think about this:
They designed the system in 1981.
They expected it to last 30 years.
So that's... until 2011?
And now they're saying it'll run out around the end of this decade. That'd be about 2010-2011ish, no?
Sounds like everything's going according to plan.
Actually with a 17 digit number ther would be 100,000,000,000,000,000 different VIN number and that doesn account for the fact that the 17 digits are alphanumeric. the problem is that there is information encoded in many of the digits. For example, the first charicter will idintify the country the engine and body were joined (where the care was "manufactured") others idintify the manufacturer, modle year, etc...
The problem will most likely be solved by assigning each country a secont third or fourth(for us and Japan) identifying digit opening up the rest of the namespace anew.
Strive to make your client happy, not necessarly give them what they ask for
I know they had made a lot of cars, but that many?
Web Sig: Eddy Currents
...vehicle ID numbering system (VIN) will soon run out of unique numbers
Ewww, ewwww...quick, rename it VINv6, adopt the change, talk about it for years on end, scare folks with the apocolyptic visions of a VINv4 disaster, implement sparingly, even have some Finish dude incorporate it into his own car line he started from scratch(obviously stolen from Ford ideas) and have absolutely NO ONE use it due to their legacy cars!
How long until we run out of SSNs? 9 digits == 1 billion unique combinations. Are they efficiently allocated?
-jim
If they produce more than a million units of any particular car in a year, they use letters in here. Sometimes they use letters anyway, to denote different car types and such. The last six characters can be essentially anything 0-Z, it leaves it up to the manufacturer.
The problem is not that duplicates will occur, it's that the year number will repeat starting in 2011. The 7th character (from the right) denotes the year, and anybody can see, this means that it loops over every 36 years. Not particularly good planning, methinks.
One simple solution is to recommend both use of all 36 chars in the serial number and to denote the first character of that number to be a character never used there before by most manufacting companies. In most cases, car companies rarely use anything above A or B for the first character of the serial, so for some this will be easy to work around. For others, it may be more difficult as they'll have to change their own internal coding scheme for the serial.
Most probable change is that the characters for countries (first character) will be stolen, like happened with 4 and 5 for US cars.
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
Virtual Private Vehicles. It's sort of a blend between a public mass-transit system and your own private vehicle.
Your car would not have its own VIN while traveling. To get to your destination, you "tunnel" your vehicle into the back of a flatbed truck. Your vehicle would be packaged into the flatbed truck along with other vehicles. Once your vehicle arrives, it would be unloaded and you would take it alone to finish the local part of the trip.
Which number can you confuse U with? And you must be pretty stupid to confuse Z with 5 or S.
Have you ever been to a turkish prison?
Maybe we just need to go to 64-bit VINs!
i am a soviet space shuttle
Good, these problems promote jobs for those of us that program for a living.
-- The box said Windows 2000 or better... so I installed Linux
and reuse the VINs from junked cars? Someone somewhere, especially in the insurance industry, must be tracking them.
Too many cars, too few digits
U.S. will run out of vehicle ID numbers. Solution? Recycle or buy from Botswana
By Eric Mayne / The Detroit News
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The auto industry's number is almost up.
The 17-digit codes that identify the origin, make, model and attributes of cars, trucks, buses -- even trailers -- worldwide will be exhausted by the end of the decade.
And like an odometer that returns to zero and starts over again, a Vehicle Identification Number -- or VIN -- could be duplicated.
Experts say duplicated VINs would cause havoc for repair shops, state license offices, insurance agencies, law enforcement and other groups that use VINs to legally rob people by fining them for "parking violations."
"We've been brainwashing law enforcement and the insurance community and virtually everybody that a VIN is like DNA -- there's one for any one vehicle--and boy are these people easy to brainwash!" said Ed Sparkman, spokesman for the Chicago-based National Insurance Crime Bureau.
At the root of the impending shortage is the explosion of vehicle production in recent decades. Automakers build 60 million cars and trucks every year and each one needs a unique VIN in the same way a newborn is injected with a Social Security chip. And that doesn't count heavy trucks, motorcycles, bicycles, and other vehicles that require VINs.
The Society of Automotive Engineers, which established the existing VIN system in 1981 and expected it to last 30 years, has doomed the problem to a committee to address the impending shortage.
One potential fix: Poach VINs assigned to smaller countries such as Botswana, which don't mass produce vehicles or donate money to US politicians.
Unlike telephone companies, which simply created new area codes to cope with a surge in households, cell phones and fax machines, the committee, typical to most committees, is not recommending longer VINs -- even though 18- or 19-character codes would not repeat for 100 years.
Longer codes would require a major overhaul of computer systems that would dwarf the challenges and expenses spawned by the Y2K computer dilemma, said Dave Proefke, chairman of the committee.
"The scope of the logistical changes and the monetary impact are just gastronomical," said Proefke, a technical engineer for vehicle security at General Motors Corp.
At smaller manufacturers, the change would cost tens of millions of dollars, Proefke said.
"For GM, it would mean a significant change for every assembly center we have, all our engineering centers, all our processing centers," he said.
To overcome the shortage, SAE is taking a close look at the first three digits of a VIN -- known separately as the World Manufacturer Identifier. It consists of numbers and letters -- excluding I, O, Q, U and Z -- because they can be mistaken for numbers or another letter by overweight, nearsighted police officers.
By international agreement, a WMI is assigned according to region. Initially, the United States had all WMI codes that started with the number 1.
"We were assuming we were always going to be 1, originally," Proefke said. "Now we're 1, 4 and 5. And we don't have that many left of 5."
Of 1,056 WMI codes available to U.S. manufacturers, 594 remain, according to SAE.
One solution that will be considered when the committee votes on a final recommendation in September or October is to reclaim WMI codes that are going unused in other regions.
More than two dozen countries, from Armenia to Zimbabwe, have up to 288 WMI codes each. All are dormant.
The group may also reclaim WMI codes from U.S. trailer, motorcycle and other manufacturers no longer in business. SAE doesn't have a precise count, but such defunct companies could be the source of enough WMI codes to supplement another 30 years of use, said Steve Ezar, manager of government and industry standardization
On the other hand, the VIN problem will affect a larger number of computers than the Y2K problem. There are, of course, the few big manufacturers, who keep track of parts and whatnot. There are thousands of dealers, and perhaps tens of thousands of auto repair facilities. Then, of course, there are all the governments around the world that keep track of auto registration. All of these locations use VIN numbers in various ways, be it for record keeping, tracing design decisions and parts, locating parts for repairs, etc. Now imagine that all of these locations, some very big, and some very small, need new programming because of a change to the VIN system. And this change will affect all of these locations at the same time, not from time to time as with date rollover problems. Further, most auto repair facilities use computers and programming that they obtained years ago, and who knows if the software vendor is even around anymore. The source code is probably long gone for many of these applications.
The problem is that the VIN numbers are being used up as new vehicles are being manufactured. When the last VIN is gone, all of these systems will have to be up to date for the change, and that means a lot of money spent on new computers, new programming, and whatever trouble it takes to convert old records to the new system, which will have to be backwardly compatible with the old VIN numbering system.
Let this be a lesson: Whenever a unique number is needed, let's use about 40 digits in a base 36 system, consisting of letters and numbers. That'll cover us for a while.
If you RTFA (yeah right), WMI is the first three digits of the VIN and identifies the manufacturer. Apparently US manufactureres can only use about a thousand of these, even though there should be 31^3 = 29,791 total possibilities. A lot of those combinations are probably going unused; why not use them first before doing things like adding digits that will require major changes to the system?
The article talks about taking WMIs from countries that aren't using them, but doesn't really say if there's WMIs out there that aren't really assigned to anyone.
Remember the days when Republicans were the party of fiscal responsibility?
call it ipv6, and integrate expanded vins, authentication, various forms of security, and then, when it's ready to go live, we'll have everyone change thier IP's, I mean VINs, at the same time, causing a massive backup at the DMV, taking years, maybe even decades to recover.
Awe yeah, payback for all those hours I've spent renewing my license.
The VIN includes a year code (10th character from the left) that denotes the year the car was made. However, this loops after 30 years (they left out potentially confusing chars in the yearcode, like I, O, U, Q, Z, and zero).
But in 2011, the year loops. That's the only problem, really.
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
I had recently upgraded my car and my home state lets you move your license plates to your new car as long as you sell your old one at the same time. Fortunately for me, the state hadn't gotten around to turning my '68 Mustang into a '92 Prizm and the patrolman copied the information straight from the computer to the ticket.
When I received a summons in the mail, I disputed it with the cause being that I was in a '92 Prizm and did not even own a '68 Mustang, and the complaint was completely dropped.
The moral of the story: if I find out that I share a VIN with an Edsel on blocks in some farmer's pasture, then the police will have to use a spectrometer to measure my speed. I'll be driving my "get out of jail free" car until the sonic booms shake it apart.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
MIT.
They were allocated a huge block of VINs when they once were considering getting into the automobile business. I think it's about time they started sharing.
Isn't a really, REALLY easy solution to add in a different checkdigit scheme? If the checkdigit matches the old pattern, use the old system. If it's one more than the old pattern, use a new system. That way, we can make better use of the trillion or so available numbers. That wasn't so hard now, was it?
"Golly, if it's that serious maybe I should start stocking up on MREs and ammunition in preparation for the day the assembly lines come to a screeching halt."
No, it's time to stock up on VINs. Anyone want to buy the rights to 4S6RN38F94L296406 ?
--- What?
Then you could recycle the tags all you wanted to. I mean really now, how hard could this be? A date tag with a serial number would allow you to reroll the serial number every year if you wanted to (or hell, every day if you use 8 digits!).
This just sounds like such a non-issue due to the extreme short-sightedness of whatever idiots came up with this scheme.
Suggest they use IPv6 methodology. It basically has unlimited IDs...
http://www.isolvesystems.com - Technology Marketplace
This tinfoil crap is slowly getting on my nerves. Doesn't anyone see the purpose of a VIN?
Whenever I buy a car, the first thing I get is the VIN so I can check the car's background. This is invaluable. A central registry about cars has many advantages.
If I remember correctly the left 11 digits are used for make, model, production location, model year etc.... ---the 8th digit from the right is the model year alpha-numeric 1-9 + A-Z they skip 0, I, O and Q (L = 1990 and S=1995)
They could become case sensitive with the year, or use mor characters in the ASCII table.
I thought the last 6 digits were supposed to be unique, except it doesn't make sense since I have never seen letters there (maybe there are) and that would have broke after 1 Million cars.
They could just reassign the letter used for the manufacturer and start over with the year code. This doesn't sound like it has to be that big of a problem for them. Do all GM's have to start with 1G and all Fords with 1F and all toyotas with 1T?????
See the Pictures of the Flood of '08
Let's put this into perspective. Y2K affected virtually every computer system built between the 1960's and the mid 80's. Auto manufacturers can hardly make this claim... What systems read VIN numbers outside of the auto manufacturing industry??? Police, State MVD's and insurance companies are the only ones I can think of. Yeah, it's going to be a PITA, but to claim it's going to be an effort on par with Y2K seems a bit ludicrious.
Xenon, where's my money? -Borno
So just use letters in the last six digits as well as numbers.
Seems like this shouldnt have been a problem - the engineers predicted it would last 30 years when they designed it in 1981 and its still predicted to run out around 2010, id call that spot on and if no-one bothered to design the systems to be easily upgradable then its their fault. All serial numbering systems should have a basic plan for extension even if its not expected to be needed for decades, and all applications that use the numbers should be designed with that in mind!
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A verylarge fleet services company, with whose verylarge Oracle database I work, uses the VIN as a variable chararacter field. It is not a key field but is indexed. The point being that the VIN was a secondary means of identifying a vehicle outside of Fleet and Unit number. I say: blow 'er wide open.
Have you Meta Moderated t
R BELONG TO US
The Society of Automotive Engineers, which established the existing VIN system in 1981 and expected it to last 30 years, has formed a committee to address the impending shortage.
Perhaps I am daft, or perhaps the reporting was inaccurate, but I do not see the crisis. The second quote indicates the system was established in 1981 and was expect to last 30 years, which is 2011. The first quote indicates that the numbers will run out around 2009. Does this mean that the auto industry is in crisis because of a 10% error in their estimation? It really sounds like the numbers running out was expected, and the meeting to discuss the future should just be routine.
Unlike the Y2K thing, in which everyone assumed that computers would be replaced regularly, there was certainly no doubt that we would still be making cars in 2010, and if we depended on a VIN, those cars would need one.
From a programming point of view, I am sure many database designers used the VIN as the primary key, and this is why it will cost so much to revamp. After all, we were all assured that the number will always unique. Common sense, however, tells us not to trust anything we don't have total control over, and not to make design decisions based on the assumption that outside forces will never change their minds. Therefore, it might make sense for an auto manufacturer to use the VIN as a primary key. However, I wonder why it made sense for everyone else to do the same, assuming that this is the case.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
A serial number should be exactly that - a number which denotes no more information than the sequential number of the item that came off the production line.
A VIN is sort of a zombie half dead half alive number. It contains information about the item it is attached to, as well as the serial number.
The real problem is not that it's limited - it had a life span, it's lived that span of time - it's that people developing systems and processes to deal with cars made the assumption that the VIN is not limited in its life span.
The VIN is useful, no doubt, but the reality is that each car should have a VIN that doesn't contain the serial number and a seperate serial number. If you want to keep both in one number then you can form it yourself by putting the VIN before the serial number.
They should have designed it to scale 30 years ago.
But the reality now is that we're due for an upgrade. Now the VIN will be expanded and stored on an RFID chip (or barcoded at minimum).
-Adam
I'm surprised we haven't heard something similar about CC numbers. Debit and credit cards, prepaid etc AFAIK all share the same numbering world wide. Does anyone know?
You misspelled the title. It should say Auto Manufacturers Running Out Of Unique Ideas.
And databases are never current even in the best of situations and given my experience with recycled phone numbers when the previous owner was a deadbeat, you would come to regret a owning a vehicle with a recycled VIN that had ever been listed as stolen or on criminal records.
Sounds like they need to come up with an LBA mode for VINs..
>2005-??-?? ??? - "Some *really* old versions of UNIX (e.g. 16-bit BSD) die in 2005.".
See! BSD is dying!!
So it's really just the US that's having problems, right? So now we'll be taking over countries for their VIN prefixes....
1) Begin design and manufacture of the "automobile router" that can delegate and manage hundreds private VIN's per single real VIN.
2) ???
3) Profit!
My only regret... is that I have... bonitis..
...would be an even better headline.
Lets take a look at a VIN. First you can only use capital letters and numbers, except for the letters I, O and Q. If you can't tell if its a letter or a number then its a number. WVW EE83A2 SE219476 The first three characters are the WMI, world manufacturer identifier. With the above VIN its pretty obvious who made this car (volkswagen). I can't speak for other manufacturers, but with volkswagen the first character is the country of manufacture. This Passat was built in Germany. The next six characters are the VDS, vehicle descriptor section. Manufacturers use this to describe the vehicle traits, and if you google for "volkswagen vin decoder" (or whatever manufacturer you're looking for) you can probably find out what the codes represent. The last digit in this section is a check digit. The final 8 characters are the VIS, vehicle identifier section. At least, the last 5 digits must be numbers and it is the production number of the car (serial number). The first character in this section is the year of manufacture. With VW, the second character in this section is representative of the plant that built the car. The remaining digits are the production number. If you look at the year of manufacture it rolls over every 30 years anyways. With a little common sense it shouldn't matter if two cars have the same VIN... there would be an age difference of 30 years.
If I find myself in charge of inventing a numbering system, estimate the range necessary and then double the number of bits used.
"[...]would dwarf the challenges and expenses spawned by the Y2K computer dilemma."
So, in this engineer's opinion, we've got more systems using VINs than dates?
And I thought that the Y2k issue was sort of shortsighted. These people have NO excuse for this fiasco. In 1981, the people who invented these VIN's thought that 31 years was sufficient? They didn't know that there were cars around that were more than 31 years old then? They thought so little of the cars made at that time to think that none of them would last for 31 years? To think, our tax money will help the DMV fix this problem, no matter how they fix it.
First of all, you use the VIN to seach for details about a vehicle in a database, its not there to build a vehicle out of, which is the essential purpose of DNA for humans.
Secondly, you can't use a DNA sequence to seach for information about a person by simply typing it into a form somewhere on the net.
And then there exists the fact that there exist humans with the exact same DNA. Identical twins, for example, have the same genetic code.
They should say something like "a VIN is to a vehicle as an SSN is to a person." Even though the SSN is only in the US, its still a better analogy in comparison.
Just upgrade Vins to IPV6 and the problem is solved :)
. I love the sound of burning women and screaming rubber....
how about people just stop buying cars? I mean, get real, it's so much cheaper to keep an old car running than to build a new one.
Impossible! How would they reach us, why they'd need a million cars to... oh. Crap!
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
So they're going to make 64-bit cars now?
Privacy is terrorism.
Don't worry...the badguy robots all turn on this red E.T. heart light thingy.
"Draco dormiens nunquam titillandus."
There is a rule that the last 8 characters of a VIN are used to ID the car. The previous ones the make/model/manufacturer. Strike the last 4 numeric rule and you've suddenly got a shitload more unique codes.
That would be a much simpler solution then extending the field length because the expensive dinosaur systems that run car dealerships right now probably wouldn't handle a change in the length of the field.
The rules say numbers and capital letters only, no I, O or Q. Can some bored CS major out there tell use how many new cars would be added by changing from 4Alphanumberic+4Numeric to 8Alphanumeric?
I speak from experience
>> do with an odometer in kilometers though, so my title says 9,999,999 miles on it.
Obviously it's not a ford.
Well, it could be - probably right after the purchase he had to roll it backwards a few feet to get it up on the blocks.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Why not allocate letters to the country of manufacture?
VIN2 can start with a Z.
It was designed to last only 30 years. Obviously if they allocated the number more efficiently you wouldn't run out, but the guys who designed it don't care because now they have to be hired out of retirement as consultants (or at the very least that was their intention). They are comparing this to Y2K not because it is that bad, but because the people who orchestrated the crisis want to prep their potential customers, to get them used to the idea of paying outrageous fees for an overhaul, regardless of how dificult (or, rather, easy) the fix turns out to be.
Mathematics is not a crime.
The car biz envies the computer biz. Their own equity languished in comparison to dotcom stocks, so they used the Al Qaeda planebombings to justify financing billions in SUV debt. Now they want the budgets spent on Y2K for their own IT. Nowhere in the article does it explain how the 17 digit VIN, containing several letters (therefore a capacity of at least millions of billions, if not trillions of trillions, of unique IDs) are actually "running out". Or why this is a surprise, when the 1981 system, planned to last 30 years, is possibly approaching a limit after 25 - 85% of the way into its lifetime. Who knows exactly where this story comes from - most likely, the media obsession with fear of threats to the status quo.
--
make install -not war
Duplication could still occur, but the difference between a 30-year-old vehicle and a new one should help avoid any confusion, experts say.
"It's common sense," said Val Vitols, executive director of Michigan's Automotive Theft Prevention Authority.
But not many people have/use common sense. They tend to freak out when something new/confusing drops into their path and messes up their routine.
>insert witty sig file here
That's OK, I'll just set my VCR to 1972 again.
"Remember, there never were pineapple-almond cookies here."
Hell, this has happened previously in Spain. Madrid used to have M-XXXX-L (where X is a number and L a letter). When they finished they went for M-XXXX-LL. Valladolid did the same, the same for most of the spanish cities. If this could be done in Spain - which is far from being as avanced in computing as the eeuu is - I'd laught if this can't be done in the states...
Sounds like a problem with red tape, rather than a problem with the actual amount of available numbers. They just need to figure out a better way to use the space they have. A 17 digit code, where each digit is either a letter or a number (36 possibities for each digit) has 286,511,799,958,070,431,838,109,696 possible combinations!
Somehow I doubt even a tiny fraction of 286 septillion cars have been produced, or will ever be produced.
Do not read this sig.
GUIDs -- let's just bite the bullet and never run out of IDs again.
Sure you use more space in the DB but the cost of that compared to haveing to rearchitect and update all of the hardware and scanners and such is negligible.
allow letters in the serial number portion, overlay models onto the "old" model designations, revisit closed plant IDs for that section of the VIN... lots of possibilities out there. it's pretty simple to fix any code that demands that the last 6 characters be numeric, for instance, and the hardest part is for folks to accept that if you set too small an address space, you have to hack it later and fool up your pretty rules.
this is not rocket science, and civilization will not die.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
VINv6?
Now, we just need some clueless politician and/or judge to decree that we need to be able to keep the same VIN when we switch cars. After all, it's just as personal as a phone number or an IP address, right?
Who cares if it completely neuters the data model, is hard if not impossible to implement, and results in massive confusuion and overhead nightmares, it's the in thing to do, making all these pesky numbers portable.
Come to think of it, my VIN already is portable, I put a few hundred miles on it a month.
unless you're converting the numbers to uint to conserve space...
Luckily, auto manufacturers haven't run out of really stupid names for their cars; Toureg, Aztec, Nubira, etc. Were these spit out by the same computer that gave us Viagra?
worst sig ever. . .
VINs are a very handy feature.
Last year I started looking for a car. At the time I was really interested in a Subaru SVX, since they're kind of like relics of the 80s future that never was.
Anyhow, I was very close to buying one from a guy that seemed reputable, but just to be on the safe side I ran the VIN through Carfax.
It turned out that that particular VIN had been issued a "dismantled" title, meaning the car had been damaged so heavily that it was no longer possible to repair it and re-title it. It was actually illegal to drive on the road.
I figured there were two possibilities - either the dealer had bought the wrecked car and fixed it up using substandard parts, or he'd done a Gone in 60 Seconds (the original version) on it and swapped the VIN tags from the wrecked car with those from a stolen one. Either way, it wasn't something I wanted to pay $5000 for.
"...always new atoms but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday." -Richard Feynman
1. License the right to build cars in countries with no existing car industry ...
2. Snap up all those unused VINs
3.
4. Profit!
To celebrate the occasion of my 1000th post, I will post no more forever on Slashdot. Goodbye.
What happens when you buy a car at auction. I believe the original VIN is removed and replaced with a new one. For example, a car sold at auction in New York will get a new VIN with something like NY12345.
So they could just start using a hex VIN starting at zero and have old cars come in for re-vin'ing if a duplicate arises. Good thing they don't hire me to decide those things...
I misphrased that. By "particular car" I meant like "Ford" or "Chrysler" or "Toyota". While a manufacturer than use the 3rd digit to denote the specific car type (like "Impala" or "Taurus" or "WhateverPieceOfShitToyotaMakes"), few do that. Most use a letter in the serial number instead.
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
Dont they keep track of cars which can be confirmed to have been destroyed? Why not re-use numbers?
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
You'll never work in this town again! ... Unless, of course we need you.
I ground the VIN numbers off my car everytime I ermm....get.....a new one :-D
If you can't say something nice, make sure you have something heavy to throw.
The problem is that there's a lot of countries that we don't import vehicles from that have country codes assigned. They don't really need them. Take the whole range of F* codes:
FA-FE Ghana
FF-FK Nigeria
FF-FK Madagascar
FL-F0 not assigned
GA-G0 not assigned
HA-H0 not assigned
While there's the G and H codes to steal from essentially nobody, the F codes are pretty useless to those countries too, as they don't make cars for the US. See, the codes only really apply to cars here in the US, other countries can do whatever the hell it is that they want to do. So we could gank the whole F series without much problem.
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
It will be a lot more expensive to upgrade all of the individual dealerships and repair shops. Tons of old mainframe-based code that is hardcoded to accept 17 digits. In addition, many of the preprinted forms actually have seventeen separate spaces for the VIN digits, rather than one big box. There are all sorts of little things like this that will need to be taken care of.
The local DMV, insurance company does not seem to have a problem with my car's less than 17 digit VIN.
So the systems in place must already be more flexible than is suggested by the article.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
Finally - a slashdot comment that is both insightful and a load of bull!
STOP MAKING AUTOMOBILES! :-p
Look out honey, 'cause I'm using technology; Ain't got time to make no apology
Isn't the simplest way to eliminate unique-number obsolescence just to incorporate the YYYY (or YYYYMM or YYYMMDD if you must) into the first x digits of the unique number? That way if you won't run out in a single year, you will never run out. Well, not until the year 9999, anyway...
Just convert VINs to run on 64-bit processors. I'm assured this solves all addressing problems into the foressable future.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
I dont think anybody would mistake some 20 year old car as new one.
no need to make numbers longer - just extend
alphabet with additional characters.
Arguably, this would be easier upgrade for existing
systems.
The thing that i have yet to see anyone mention is this:
Most of the car models in the lowest registers of the VIN numbers are no longer in production, and haven't been for 20-some years. We *could* re-use some of those numbers.
Secondly, I don't know if you've noticed or not, but there are much fewer car companies than there used to be, *and* each company is making much fewer models.
It won't be long before SUVs are no longer `cool', and gasoline will be rare and prohibitively expensive. More folks will be buying cars that run on fuel cells or electricity.
Thenagain, car makers should just STFU, bite the bullet, and understand that shit like this happens. If it were thought through a little more 30 years ago, we wouldn't have to do it yet.
The key is designing a system that doesn't expire until after you've died
do() || do_not();
Unlike telephone companies, which simply created new area codes to cope with a surge in households, cell phones and fax machines, ...
Simply? Donchya just love it when a complex problem can be dismissed with that simp... er, ... single word?
We're running out of area codes too.
Then there's large metro areas that have switched to 10 or even 11 digit dialing. Say you move to such a place and you take your phone with with you -- you know, the one with all your those numbers programmed into it by your wife -- and you need to add the area codes to all of them. Going the other way, some (many? most?) areas that only use 7 digit dialing and you gotta remove the area codes.
No big deal you say? Chances are it's her phone and she lost the manual. Or maybe it just seems to always happen that way.
Then there's area code splits. I'd hate to be responsible for any sizable contact database when that happens.
Good thing that phone numbers can be dealt with so simply.
:^j
OK, show of hands: how many of you know two or more VINs? Good. Now all you smart asses put your hands down. Ah. I see one hand up in ... I think that's Montana ... and there's three in North Carolina. OK, hands down.
Now, how many of you know three or more phone numbers?
[earth's orbit shifts slightly]
Thank you.
"Where's my other sock?" - A. Einstein
Their numbering must eventually end and what will happen then?
For VINs 'doppelgangers' might be a solution, using some other marker to identify in conjunction with the VIN, like the area those VINS were issued in.
Remembered a link here to credit card numbering logic, interesting read.
Well.. you techincaly don't.. I THINK. If you never ever earn an income then you don't need a tax id because you never fill a tax return. (or does the gov mandate that eveyone file a tax return, even if you only live in a state park and eat wild berries?)
And if you don't participate in (i.e, plan to draw benifits from) the U.S. dept of health's social security program, you don't need an SSN..
I'm probably wrong though....
use ipv6, of course.
It's not like cars won't eventually get their own ip anyway, so let's do it now.
"It's 1 Z D R J (aleph) (delta) (omicron) (one quarter vulgar fraction) (ordinal indicator, masculine) (cyrillic capital letter KJE) (surjection, z notation finite). Oh shoot, I forgot the (german penny sign). Lemme start all over..."
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
add Windings, I want my vin to have happy faces.
17 positions, each with 36 possible characters, yeilds 286,511,799,958,070,431,838,109,696 different possible VINs!!! I refuse to beleive they have used up all possible combinations! They don't need more digits or more posible characters for each digit, they just need to relax the encoding rules a bit!
This has happened before. Take a look at a VIN for a car made prior to 1970. As a side, I sold a 1967 VW bug to someone out of state 5 years ago (I am in California, I believe they where in Nevada). Their DMV requirement was a notarized memo w/ VIN and title photocopy "proving" ownership in my state. I went to my bank at the time, Washington Mutual, who was unable to process it because a requirement was putting the VIN in their system. As it turns out their validation system would not accept my VIN because it was too short. I ended up having to get it done at another bank.
Add some digits which would identify them as post 200x. Systems which are not upgraded to accept these digits but which can have two vehicles per number should still have operators intelligent enough to figure out which of (come on, seriously, at MOST two) vehicles they are looking for.
From the article:The Society of Automotive Engineers, which established the existing VIN system in 1981 and expected it to last 30 years, has formed a committee to address the impending shortage.
Well hell, 30 years? That was pretty friggin' short-sighted. Can you say, "Digging your own grave." How about, "Making your own bed?"
And how can you come up with a 17 digit code that only lasts 30 years.
I guess the degree of automotive engineer didn't require much math in the 70s and 80s.
A lot of people are saying that this shouldn't be any big deal, and even that it would be trivial to use alphanumeric VIN's, leaving a huge number of possibilities. However, the problem with this is that there is a huge amount of hardware around that relies on the existing VIN format, such as the machines the parking-ticket people use or eqipment at the vehicle factory. While it is usually (unless you lost the source code, but that's another story) possible to update software to handle the larger numbers, it's a completely different story when the code is etched in hardware. Furthermore, these hardware devices are very light-weight, meaning that memory is at a premium and the designers would have been unlikely to build their systems in a way that would easily handle the extra digits.
As for those who are saying that alphanumeric VIN's should be used, it's a pretty big deal to add alphanumeric keyboards to all the machines with only numeric keyboards.
I understand that with ipv6 there is supposed to be approximately 340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,770,000,00 0 ip addresses available. As more and more vehicles are using technology like onstar and becoming more computerized it's only a matter of time before you will be able to access your vehicle (statistics, upgrades, etc) through a web interface. At that point, you will need an ip number for it and it could double as the vin number.
are scum.
First, you were driving at a high rate of speed.
Second, you got caught
Third, the patrolman decided you seemed decent enough, and beside you serve the country, and cut you a break writung you a ticket for 5 miles over the limet.
Then you though it all back at him using some cheesy mistake.
You are no different then a billion dollar company moving money around to avoid taxes.
As a vetran, I find what you have done not only an insult to police force, but a disgrace to the uniform.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
They're just saying that because they don't want to do it. They'd rather make a big deal about it so that when they finally have to do it, they'll get paid more for it.
-------
"In times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act."
-- George Orwell
Dealing with handwriting is why certain characters were eliminated. Think of error correcting/preventing codes. The check digit really only existed to prevent the casual abuser from falsifying warranty claims and VIN tags.
One of the designers is worried about not having enough numbers and suggests they use a larger numberspace or an easily extensible system and some other clever guy says, "Heh! It'll be a great day when we have that problem!"
I can't counthow many times I've heard that. But nobody ever ends up happy when that day comes.
Cheers.
I mean all your variable are defined in one place, right? There all clearly labeled, right? plus you can just go to the documentation...
OTOH, the IT community could use a job boost, so with any luck all thre systems are hard code and have variable names like asd34fd. oh, and no comment or documentation.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Anybody else got a feeling that they're just complaining about it so they can charge more for their cars without invoking the Sherman acts?
"We sold so many cars we're running out of numbers for them all."
Boo-hoo. I need a tissue.
WWJD? JWRTFA!
'Longer codes would require a major overhaul of computer systems...'
The developer should have considered using a long instead of an int.
In this world nothing is certain but death, taxes and flawed car analogies.
It's just that countries get a range of those two characters. While the US has 1*, 4*, and 5*, and Canada has 2*, Mexico has 3A-3W and Costa Rica has 3X-37.
The whole first three characters (known as the WMI) get assigned by the SAE, according to whatever-the-hell-system they feel like using. They just happen to assign it certain ways.
Google for "VIN Country Codes" for the complete list.
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
The first and second positions are the country and manufacturer, respectively. The U.S. has three digits for the country code, and 31 possibilities for the manufacturer (ten numeric digits, plus 26 letters minus I, O, Q, U, and Z since they could be mistaken for numbers or another letter). So do we have over 90 manufacturers? I'm thinking it is around 3 (separate divisions such a Chevrolet and Pontiac are represented by the next position). And speaking of that, each company can have 30 or so divisions or vehicle types or classes. Positions 4-8 are for vehicle features like body style or engine type. Plenty of room there. Ninth position is a check digit. Not clear if this could be a sticking point. Probably not. Next digit represents the year. This rolls over every 30 years, but that should not be much of an issue. The next position is for the manufacturing plant of origin. Again, 31 possibilities for each division of each company. The remaining six digits are the serial number, which could allow up to a million cars per plant per year, unless a company/division assigns more than one code to a given plant. Now, how many millions identical (remember, different engine, transmission, etc... differentiates the VIN) units does even a flagship brand like Ford produce in a year? I think it is safe to say that it is less than 30 million. Especially given that "Automakers build 60 million cars and trucks every year...."
I also found this amusing: "Of 1,056 WMI [first three positions of the VIN] codes available to U.S. manufacturers, 594 remain, according to SAE. " Oh, no! That's less than half! Wait, no it isn't.
Aside from the idiocy of a system limited to a wraparound in the year 2011, If we're risking an overlap beyond that, then we have proven our idiocy as a consumer culture.
31 countries.
31 Manufacturers.
31 Vehicle types.
31^5 Body style/Engine type/series/etc combinations per vehicle type.
In one of 31 potential plants. Each with a run "limited" to 31^6 of this specific combination.
If one plant is spewing out over 800 million of a specific SUV each year, there's clearly a level of mental retardation in our society that should have left us all resembling monkeys who have barely discovered fire.
Admittedly, some reallocation is in order here. The addressing system is slightly out of whack relative to the actual production output of any given plant. However, I have a solution if that can't be done:
Hey, manufacturers! Listen up! STOP MAKING SO MANY GODDAMNED CARS.
(That said, the problem is said to hit at the end of the decade, which is right on schedule, as many posters have noted.)
Raptor
"Procrastination is great. It gives me a lot more time to do things that I'm never going to do."
They mention in the article that the current system, put in place in 1981, was designed to last 30 years. That's 2011. Now they say they'll run out by the end of the decade. That's 2010. Wow, a whole year short of plan?
Also, it sounds like with very minor tweaks, they could get another 30 years out of the system. Beautiful!
If car makers could step back from their ego slightly, and use more than one "division" character for each division, you'd get even more encoding space. The "division" is basically a subcategory of manufacturer, and is encoded in the 3rd digit. For US VINs, a 'G' in the second position is GM. A '2' in the third position means 'Pontiac'. What if they used more characters there to also mean Pontiac? Ditto for GMs other divisions? Heck, what if we used multiple 'make' designations for GM? Why only "G"?
So what's the issue again?
--JoeProgram Intellivision!
Are you serious? The guy who wrote the original application quit *ages* ago. If everybody got fired for making "magic numbers" in the applications, there'd be no freakin' applications! There'd be no programmers, no software, nothing.
You show me an application without magic numbers, and I'll show you a coder who's out of work and bored and coding something without a deadline. I'll also show you a program that few, if any, people actually use.
Welcome to the real world, friend.
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
ISBN numbers, which are intended to uniquely identify books, are also running out. This is due in part to the boom in self-publishing. Like VINs, some digits are reserved to identify the company (publisher), others are a serial number doled out by the publisher, and there's a simple check digit to catch typos, transpositions, etc.
The ISBN format was a little more flexible, though. The publisher identifer could be a variable number of digits. Big publishers got short codes, and thus more digits for the serial number. Small houses got long codes and just a few digits for the serial number. Thus a lot more of the identity space can be used.
But the internet self-publishing (or print-on-demand) companies (e.g., iUniverse, FirstBooks, etc.) were late to the game, so they didn't get the short publisher codes like other prolific houses. In the end it works out, as you can assign multiple publisher codes to a publisher that prints more titles than originally allowed for.
The self-publishing companies are cranking out hundreds of titles a year. Unlike a traditional publisher, there's no drawback to setting up a title that may never sell since the author pays these costs. This is rapidly accelerating the depletion of code numbers. And since self-publishing companies never take books "out-of-print," they can't recycle serial numbers in their space. (I'm not certain recycling is allowed in the system, but you could imagine doing so for books that are long out-of-print.
Obviously, there are advantages to having meaning built into the number rather than using a strictly serial number. Auto insurers can get most of what they need to know about the car out of the VIN (manufacturer, model year, body type, etc.). Book sellers can figure out which publisher's catalog to check by looking up the beginning of an ISBN. But the trade-off is severely limiting flexibility for when the identity space is depleted (as with VIN and ISBN), or the assumptions change radically (as with ISBN in a self-publishing world).
How long should the VIN have been?
Would making the VIN longer for the past 30 years so we didn't have to update it now have been worth the increased costs of data storage, longer VIN printing, data entry, etc, over the past 30 years? Keep in mind that data storage was at a premium in 1980 - every bit counted. Not spending money on that storage in 1980 was probably worth the hassle of expanding the VINs now.
We could make VINs 1,000 digits long, and we'd still be able to use them on starships, but it'd be pretty stupid to do so.
paintball
The major problem with using lower case letters is a physical one - the VIN plate on your vehicle is a piece of stamped metal of a a specified-by-law size and shape, with a specified-by-law font that ensures that Mr. County Sherriff can clearly read what that thing says without making mistakes.
The mechanics of stamping a piece of metal precludes fancy fonts - and lower case letters will tend to end up smears, rather than clear text.
Besides, a lot of the software will helpfully uppercase the letters for you (since it cannot be lower case, yet most keyboards these days are multicase), so you're still right back to the "expensive to update all the software" problem.
There is a A *MUCH* simpler solution.
Those 17 positions include a lot of detail about the type of vehicle/engine, et cetera. Even *one* difference is enough to change that position and the checksum characters, which will make the VINs unique. So, any auto manufacturer at risk of overlapping VINs,
Everything hinges on the 5 characters in positions 4 through 8 (body style, Engine type, model, series) along with the checksum in position 9. The manufacturer has positions 12 through 17 to play with, and 31 possible values to put into each position, or 31^7 possible serial numbers that they can use in a year.
In other words, for a guaranteed overlap, that manufacturer would have to build 27 billion identical cars in a single year to exhaust the entire serial number space.
That's what, 4 cars for every human on the planet?
They will scream because the vehicle that they want to be serial number "A00001" has to be shunted to serial number "A00003", but in the grand scheme of things, it can be dealt with by creative assignment of the serial number range.
Chivalry is not dead, it's just frequently misspelt. - M. Langley
Or did the engineers want to make sure they had a job in 30 years for the redesign?
A few years back, according to Discovery Channel's FBI Files or New Detectives (i forget which exactly), there was a Canadian car dealer who would steal high-end cars in canada, and replace their VIN tags with those from the same make/model in a junk yard.
Eventually, he needed more VINs and sent a few scouts to US car lots to record VINs from US cars right off the lot.
They finally prosecuted him, but they estimate that there are ~$7 million worth of high end cars that they apparently can't (or are too lazy) to locate.
It's obvious that there is no central VIN tracking system, or the FBI would have used to to search for duplicates between the US and Canadian registries.
That would be.... 2010?
"The Society of Automotive Engineers, which established the existing VIN system in 1981 and expected it to last 30 years, has formed a committee to address the impending shortage." At least until 2011? Did someone forget to update their timeline?
This comment does not necessarily represent the views and opinions of the author.
Call in the IPv6 guys to fix everything up.
Since the obvious solution is much cheaper than any other choice (cost essentially zero vs. billions of dollars), the automobile industry will obviously do the same thing the telephone industry did, borrow numbers from where they aren't being used.
The newspaper article gave the example of what they can (and almost certainly will) do to fix the shortage of numbers: borrow manufacturer codes from countries that do not now and probably won't ever have automobile manufacturers, like Botswana.
The lessons of history teach us - if they teach us anything - that nobody learns the lessons that history teaches us.
Im not a terribly big fan of cob jobs, but im thinking about why this may not a problem. What would stop them from reusing old VIN numbers in the serialized portion of the code? If the rest of the code is still accurate there should be no full code dupes. And if for some reason there was. The state of license and the plate number would handle the possibility of dupes.
The only thing left over would be destroyed, disassembled or un-IDed cars, im wondering if this is a large enough number to be concerned about.
Then again, though I guess solar-powered cars will need VINs, too...
anyone notice some numbering systems aren't very resillient, and some others are?
When are we expected to run out of MAC addresses?
OT. If they have to go through that much trouble anyway, why not seize the opportunity and convert to Metric, too!? Only half ;-) Once the manufacturers start, the rest of the country will follow...
This can not be a problem. A 17 digit code with each digit 0-Z allows 17^36 or 10^44.3 Each person on earth can own more cars than there are grains of beachsand on earth! Or buy one car each microsecond until the end of the SUN!
This is true even if half a dusin of the positions are limited to be a number.
(I am guessing 1000 grains of beachsand fills a ml, and that all beaches on earth contains 40 million cubic kilometer of beachsand, and that the Sun will burn for 5 trillennia)
Quick, someone patent VIN's with one more digit....
Ok, I know there are a lot of systems that would have to be updated to deal with any kind of change to VIN codes.
But dwarf Y2K? Come on. Seriously.
You mean we're ment to believe there are more software applications that deal with VIN codes than there are which deal with dates?
The issues in finding a single solution to the VIN code itself may be a far more complex issue than the issue of 2 digit vs. 4 digit dates.
But once a solution has been agreed on fixing it will be MUCH easier (as big of a job as it will be) as there aren't nearly as many systems that will have to be updated.
--- Juggle juggle@hitesman.com
It puts the numbers in the correct boxes, or else it gets the hose again.
All employees must wash hands before seeking equitable relief.
Remember - you heard it here first (PS - I already solved this problem for one piece of software by having a drop-down select box that lets you choose the year range - pre-1980, 1980 to 2008, 2009 and up. User selects the range, and the proper year is calculated. reject vin if <> 17 chars && > 1979. Handles pre-1980 already :-)
As for the rest, you might want to go here for more information on decoding VINs.
They expected the 17-digit VIN system to last 30 years. Only 30 years. So what the hell did they think we would be using for transportation in year 31 -- hovercraft or jetpacks?
---------
There is inferior bacteria on the interior of your posterior.
Some people have already had software problems due to the changes in the allowable digits for area codes and telephone numbers. Area codes used to always have 0 or 1 for the second digit. I've seen "clever" code that stored an area code in an 8-bit byte by swapping the first two digits and converting it to an integer.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Tack the year when they run out onto the end of the VINs, then start back at the beginning of the valid sequences. The concept late model then has semantic context. Then the systems only need to be modified to allow multiple matches for the same VIN, since you'd only store the 17 characters. When a car is reported stolen, the VIN is easy to reconstruct since the last four digits would be one of a few years. And you could determine which of those is the most likely in database lookups pretty easily, and you could always know the correct entry when you know the model year of the vehicle.
No muss no fuss.
Then require that by say 2030 all VIN storing systems needed to be replaced with a compliant system for 21 character or larger VINs. Make the VINs with the wrap years as the last four digits (of 21 character VINs) be skipped on new VINs once the new system is online.
Of course just like Y2K and phone number portability, they'll wait until 2029 to decide to actually implement and petition for more time saying 26 years wasn't long enough...
- Tjp
I am in wallow with my inner money grubbing capitalistic pig. ... Oink!
Just do the easy solution and give every new car an IPv6 address, using that in place of the VIN.
Would also make wireless into cars easier.
So here's another MAJOR DISASTER waiting to happen, right? How many people think that this is seriously going to become a major issue in car manufacturing, resulting in a situation that is very difficult and expensive to fix? There are plenty of short-term solutions (many of which we've seen here) that can easily make the problem a non-issue until longer VIN codes are approved and make their way through the system (including database entries as well as the physical machines which stamp the codes).
Another overhyped non-issue ...
How the hell can one 'run out of numbers'? It carries on till infinity and anyway, why can't you start reusing numbers after 100 years?
Oh well, what the hell...
In it they explain how the current VIN number is layed out.
It says the 1st character is the country of origin - with 1,4,5 = USA, 2=Canada, 3=Mexico, etc.
So, that leaves only 31 other countries? [A-Z,0,6-9]
I know "J" cars are from Japan, I don't know about German, English, French, Swedish, Italian, Korean, etc. I am pretty sure they make cars in Ireland and Brazil too. I don't know how many places do make cars.
What happens if a 32nd country wants to make cars?
Aren't there something like 200 +/- countries in the world [and more all the time!]
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
Have you considered storing your phone numbers in international format(AKA SMS format)? To contact a local number here you would use an example like this:
+16045551212
(+=internationl dialing prefix),(1= country code), (604=area code), (5551212=local number).
Regardless of where on the planet that number is dialled, the tower will determine if it's a local or international call and have it correctly forwarded and billed. The same numbering format used for sending international SMS text messages can also be used for placing phone calls. The 604 area code switched to 10 number dialing a few years back. I had no problems with the transistion.
You retards who think it's ust a question of changing the metal stamping machines.... We're talking about millions of COMPUTERs worldwide, such as at your local Pep Boys, repair places, tire stores, hardware stores that sell auto parts, EVERYWHERE!! All these would need software upgrades.
Let's just stop making cars.
The article says, "Of 1,056 WMI codes available to U.S. manufacturers, 594 remain, according to SAE.". So the sum total of cars made in the USA to date has consumed LESS THAN HALF the available codes. How about this: all non-gasoline vehicles get a new VIN scheme. Gasoline will run out in 20 years, so that leaves more than enough numbers for current dinosaur-based technology.
And on the equipment that does two out of the three "stampings".
:)
I work in the Vehicle Systems building at one of GM's assembly plants, and in our building we do the VIN number that you see under the windshield and the stamping on the frame in a "secret" location (right there under the seats).
The VIN tag that gets riveted to the dash is etched using a special machine made in Germany. Every GM plant in America (and probably every GM plant in the world) has, or will have, two of these machines each.
The laser etcher shuttles an individual tag into a fixture where it gets etched, and then shuttles it out to a box where they are picked up and brought down to the line. It's all automatic other than the loading and the unloading of the tags.
IIRC, the guy on the line who attaches these has the extra responsibility of making sure that:
a) No tags are lost.
b) Tags are attached in the proper sequence.
c) No rivets are lost.
d) Etched side up.
Any missing tags or rivets will bring about the Feds. It's a big deal. Any tags that are mis-etched or damaged are collected and destroyed. Trust me, it's a big deal.
BTW, the rivets are a special one-of-a-kind design that you can't buy. I suppose the Chinese will counterfeit them any day now...
The laser etcher gets its sequence from our computers in the sky, very simple. So simple in fact that the addition of a couple extra digits is trivial.
Will the VIN etcher handle the extra digits? Most likely. We would have had to be dumbasses to buy something that wouldn't.
As a GM employe (not two e's at the end, which is another story) I put our chances at 50-50.
As for the VIN on the body, it gets there by way of the pin stamper. The pin stamper has a number of pins that are driven via air pressure and they stamp the crossbrace just behind the seats. This isn't *as* trivial as the VIN etcher, but it really isn't that bad. Basically a wider fixture with a couple of extra pins (and these might not even be necessary).
As for the engine, I can't speak with any authority on that, I don't even know where it's stamped at. But I imagine that at the most it would require a larger pad to accept the stamping (and no, I don't believe we are going to change our fonts anytime soon so there's no hope for scrunching it down).
Keep in mind that we make engineering changes all of the time , this really isn't much more than that.
So from a hardware standpoint (as one of the guys who works on these things) I really don't understand where Mr. Proefke is coming from.
Okay, so now you know.
I dream in binary.
I cry bullshit. The only problem here is that no one wants to pay to have this work done. They can't figure out a way to farm it out to India, or make it someone else's problem so now the suits are fretting. The tinny sound you hear is the smallest set of bagpipes in the world playing a dirge for the lost souls in insurance and law enforcement who are learning that hey, maybe we need to keep some IT people stateside after all.
VINs, on the other hand, need to be unique globally.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
But please don't stock up on cars.
If this thing is 17 digits, that leaves 10^17 possible VIN numbers. How many cars are being made?!? 100,000,000,000,000,000 Vin numbers. I think they have adminstration issues in how they distribute these numbers, not a lack of them.
So they run out of "VINs" the state in which the vechile is in, can provide a sticker to relate to the car.
They have been making the same keys for cars for over 20 years. I have actually opened the wrong car (looked like mine) and started it before actually finding out it wasn't mine because the seat was too far back (and they had kid toys in the back).
A VIN is important but it can be easily solved. Add more numbers.....weee!
Database geek: "We're running out of VIN's." ..."
PHB: "Okay, where can we get some more VIN's?"
Database geek: "Mmmm, Botswana, Zambia,
PHB: "Works for me! Close the plant and move all the production to Botswana."
considering that the VIN system is not reliable prior to 1986. Validating a VIN works something like this...
If VIN is post 1985 then Validate else accept it for what it is.
Just tweak this code to say...
If VIN is post 1985 and pre 2005 then Validate else if post 2004 validate with new 2005 algorithm.
problem f***ing solved. This is just another Y2k scare. VIN information is so botched this won't even register on the radar. I work for an Auto insurance company and I can tell you that atleast 20% of the VINs on our policies are a Hash missing the serial number, plant of manufacter and a couple other useless tidbits. The Insurance Industry only uses the VIN to ensure a valid rate.
So, my car (JS23N0B163XXX), if manufactured after 20xx would become (XXX361B0N32SJ).
Yeah, I know...1970 Challenger R/T VIN....you'll just have to assume the newer 17 digit VIN codes for the newer cars. It would also be quite obvious if you saw a series of numbers only (sequential build) at the beginning of the VIN that it was indeed a flipped VIN.
"The strong will do what they want, the weak will do what they must."
-Thucydides
0000:0000:0000:0000:0000:0000:0000:0000
Maybe you're a Pascal programmer? PL/SQL?
Infuriate left and right
Recycle the VIN numbers for the cars that have been destroyed... cars don last for ever...
Stop making cars.
Someday a Slashdot ID of 177180 will mean something.
Since many entities that deal with cars use (when availible) the barcode that sometimes accompanies a VIN. We run into the same problem (expanding the spectrum of numerical values) when we make VINs "case-sensitive."
It's a good idea, and it shows some genious, but the idea wont work. Keep thinking, you just might come up with an idea that will work. That's how lightbulbs too off.
main(0)
Why not re-use codes from Gremlins and Pacers? Those cars were so horrible, those codes deserve another chance.
the Geo Prism is nothing more than a rebadged Toyota Corolla. Maybe you think the same of the Corolla, but most people seem to think pretty highly of them. Are you thinking of the Metro maybe?
Incidentally, the Metro was just a rebadged Suzuki Swift. The Storm, Isuzu Impulse.
So one of the identifiers is a year. Are we making more and more cars every year so that the other fields fill up? If not, the current system should be good until after 2011, when it would wrap around to 1981 again.
Besides, there are all kinds of ideas in the article itself for getting around it, including many small countries that don't even produce vehicles that use VINs that are taking up a lot of the numbers. Cars build before 1981 didn't even have a standard, each company made up their own VIN numbers. The systems still have to account for those, so we could always go back to the old system. Many cars are out there now with duplicate VINs.
Characters 4-8 are for body style, engine type, model and series.
Character 10 is the model year.
The last 6 characters are the serial number.
Unless a manufacturer makes more than 999,999 each of about 33^4 different models per year, I don't see the problem.
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
they appear to have a 17 digit alpha numeric id containg a-z 0-9 thats 36^17 id's possible so they could have 286,511,799,958,070,431,838,109,696 cars... Surely with better management they could label every atom in every car with a uniq id!
In the UK we've changed our license plate (VIN) scheme several times in the last 20 years. It hasn't really been a major problem and each time it happens, it barely makes the news. I'm not really sure what all the fuss is about. Has the US used the same system for a very long time or something?
As for all the silly suggestions above about using case sensitive characters - in the UK at least, license plates need to be computer readable over CCTV and adding more characters makes this harder. They also need to be memorable to people as well. I can hardly see how a license plate that has strange symbols or mixed case letters is going to be memorable...
The best bet would to simply use ONLY alphabetical characters and exclude. The problem with numbers is that there are only 10 of them.
...and just add a "9"
Why not then, in the VinXP (when it comes out) have some sort of redundancy so that errors (such as 1 vs I vs l) could be corrected for?
YEAAAH. That makes us Critical and Significant, doesn't it? And I thought all we could do was sharpen our teeth and club out Mel Gibson's brains out with golf clubs on every occasion we got.
--Coder
Give each new vehicle 2 numbers and 2 linked entrys in the VIN database - thatway you get more combinations without a major overhall of the sys.
Maybe one number could be stored electronicly so the system cannot just be hacked with an anglegrinder.
This perpetual motion machine Lisa made is a joke, it just keeps getting faster and faster. - Homer
Just build another system from scratch ;-)
Dont we just loooooove that idea!
"The Society of Automotive Engineers, which established the existing VIN system in 1981 and expected it to last 30 years, has formed a committee to address the impending shortage."
So they only allowed for enough to last until 2011 anyway! What was going to happen then? What were they thinking? If they had used numbers in the form AA1-AA1-AA1 they'd have had more then 300 trillion freaking VINs. Sure it wouldn't have been as easily decoded by humans but jeez man, these guys didn't even try.
Insert witty sig here.
This doesn't help solve the problem, but:
The reason the problem occurred in the first place is because an elementary rule was broken: Never Assign Intrinsic Meanings To Codes.
Once you start with "this column means this, that column means that", you're bound for trouble. Better just assigning sequential numbers and putting the actual description of the vehicle which was given that number in a database row.
I would imagine that most VIN handling DB's use the VIN as the unique code right now. So, either you're going to have to introduce a new unique key or something to support the lookup/reference to the overflow table and entry.
--- I wish I could hear the soundtrack to my life. That way I'd know when to duck.
If you think vehicle licensing ISN'T necessary, well then, your car is mine, buddy--prove that it ain't.
Possesion of the ominous "Manufacturer's Statement of Origin" or "Manufacturer's Certificate of Origin," both aka "senior claim" or "senior title" or "fee simple" or "allodial title" and...
Sealed contract; lawful (voluntary) transmittal or transfer from previous owner and...
Charisma to enforce your senior claim based on these two lawful merits.
It's unscrupulous, dishonerable people like you "ceswiedler" that compel honorable people and citizenry to incorporate marks of another's creation such as VIN or SSN or Driver's License or Marriage License et al. It is unlawfuly to force anyone to use anyone else's registry to "identify" any object within another's records; it is always just a form of extending jurisdiction and thereby a populous to tax for recurring uneffectual services; incurred in scope of a principality and sovereign.
Like I said, you are dishonerable: a peice of shit that can't be trusted to hold someone else's purse or prized possesions responsibily, or your own God-given virginity.
Perhaps you should be asking yourself whether you can prove that you are not a slave to anyone or are a freeman? Because you advocate another's services, implying you are irresponsible to your actions and implicating adversly slander and libel unto your fellow that desire not benefice from another's registry service or record.