Slashdot Mirror
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."
reprogramming every device that read's VIN's to accept case sensitivity would be just as hard as adding an extra few digits.
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
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.
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.
Right, the big thing here is the tooling to punch the codes in to sheet metal or solid metal parts. The tooling is set up to punch certain length codes, just adding another number isn't as simple as just putting another punch on the rack, the whole mechanism would need to be changed in most situations.
matguy(.com)
No, because the VIN isn't just a serial number. It incorporates the year, manufacturer, and a lot of other info. A given VIN is only usable on another car of the same make, model, year, body style, and place of manufacture.
You could recycle numbers within one year; if a 2005 car got killed in the first year of its life, they could make another 2005 car with the same VIN, but that's probably not going to help much...
Your math doesn't hold up. Just because there are 26^17 combo's doesn't mean they all can/could be used.
EG: characters 4-8 are body style/features/engine/type/etc and 10 is the year.
I'm sure a car from 2004 will have any of the similar features of a car from the 80's, so there goes 1 whole factor, down to 26^16, I'm sure if you went through the other characteristics it would narrow it down even further.
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
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 society should contact people who work on a day-to-day basis writing code to handle the non-standard vins (pre-1980). In my case, I've already put in handlers for post-2008.
Now, since all current systems ALREADY handle vins that are not exactly 17 characters long (pre-1980) by relaxing the validation schemes and enabling extra user input options, not pre-determining the model year, etc., there's not as much work as you would seem to think.
26?!
Umm, let's talk about 26 letters (A-Z) - I'm assuming these systems are case insensitive... plus 10 numbers (0-9), I'd say that would make it 36.
Perhaps they could dramatically increase their potential name-space by making the VINs case-sensitive. That would allow 62 possible characters per place.
- passion