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."
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!"
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*
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.
Actually maybe they already do? If so, then start using the !@#$#$%^%^&*)(*& symbols!
Those symbols are usually reserved for use *after* the accident with the uninsured driver.
Mod Karma -1: I sed bad wurds. If I cep my mouf shut, I wud be at riyses.
Perhaps this will speed the transition to VINv6...
Shades of Grayden
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.
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
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
no:
2004-07-17 Sat - GPS Receiver Almanac Rollover, 256 weeks after GPS 1024-week rollover.
2004-12-31 Fri - 2004/366 - cf. 1996-366.
2005-??-?? ??? - "Some *really* old versions of UNIX (e.g. 16-bit BSD) die in 2005.".
2005-11-29 Tue - 04:53:20 UTC : 212 Gs from JD 0.0.
2006-03-29 Wed - Solar Eclipse, Brazil - Africa - Turkey - Asia.
2006-12-31 Sun - HP3000, End Of Life.
2007-01-01 Mon - Lithuania joins the Euro?
2007-01-01 Mon - "USA FAA computers fail, 32 years from 1975". TZ? 2006?
2007-08-09 Thu - CMJD 54321.
2008-01-19 Sat - 30 years before 2038-01-19 - mortgage look-ahead?
2008-03-23 Sun - Easter Sunday is unusually early this year (previously this day in 1913 & next in 2160; earliest, March 22, 1818 & 2285).
2009-01-01 Sun - NOAA: Termination of satellite processing of distress signals from 121.5/243 MHz emergency beacons. Use 406 MHz.
2009-02-13 Fri - 23:31:30 GMT is UNIX time_t 1234567890.
2009-09-09 Wed - 090909 is another possible valid nonsense or marker date; as with, of course, other 0x0x0x & 1x1x1x dates, or anything with YY small.
2???-??-?? ??? - Introduction of the Euro in the UK ???
2010-01-01 Fri - Y2.01K. There will be some who have coded only for Years 200#.
2010-01-01 Fri - Sorting YYMMDD decade-reversed covers 1990-2009 only.
2010-01-01 Fri - Reported ANSI C library overflow. Very dubious. RSVP if you can explain it.
2010-12-25 Sat - CMJD 55555.
2011-09-14 Wed - @01:46:39 UTC less leap seconds, GPS 999999999 seconds.
2011-11-11 Fri - Seen as a "marker" date - cf. 1999-09-09. Contains 11/11/11 11:11:11.
taken from: Critical and Significant Dates
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
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.'
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.
Um, actually, if they expected it to last 30 years and they expect to run out of unique VINs at the end of the current decade, it will have lasted 30 years.
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!
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.
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.
Why? Cars have to be registered and insured. Typically, things that are registered (cars, guns, people, etc) have to be uniquely identifiable. Without a VIN or some similar system of identification, such registration would not be possible.
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?
I wouldn't worry too much about it. Every industry eventually hits this dilemma and every industry deals with it in their own way. Just a few years ago (actually prior to Y2K), some of the companies in the business of Livestock Genetics were worried they'd run out of Bull numbers. (I think the standard was something like AC0023 where the first two digits identified the company and the last four were the bull's number.)
The various companies formed an IT standards committee and came to an agreement on extending the numbers. It took a year or two, but the systems got converted and life went on. It really wasn't that big of a deal. As a bonus, a real standard for data processing showed up. The previous number scheme was designed for paper and allowed for certain variations which gave computer systems a fit. e.g. Sometimes the number might be written as AC23 or simply 23. This made it difficult for a computer to decide if the code was the domestic code or the international code.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
- a claim that the VIN system was created in 1981, and expected to last 30 years
- a claim that the numbers could run out by the end of the decade
So, they expected it to last 30 years, and now somebody says it'll probably only last 29 years and you say, "I really hate to see somone that points out that 'It'll Last for X years' and it never does.'I don't know about anybody else, but if 23 years ago, someobdy engineered a system that was expected to last 30 years...and they were only off by one year...I'd cut them some slack.
Granted, they should've thought about what would happen after thirty years, but they probably did. In fact, they probably thought long and hard about it and decided either:
(a) we'll all be teleporting everywhere by then and cars won't matter anymore; or,
(b) we'll all be retired by then so who gives a rat's ass.
>2005-??-?? ??? - "Some *really* old versions of UNIX (e.g. 16-bit BSD) die in 2005.".
See! BSD is dying!!
Why does the government feel that it needs to know the "ID" of my vehicle? What business is it of theirs?
/.ers see VINs as just a serial number on a car, not some sort of gov't tracking system devised by the Illuminati. I think most /.ers don't like SSNs (to use your other example), but they are way, WAY too entrenched to just rebel against. Pick your battles, as they say.
Because they have an interest in making sure that that vehicle is safe to drive (safety inspections). Also, it makes it a little more likely that your car could be recovered if it were ever stolen. Also, I believe (not certain) that VINs are global, voluntarily created by automotive manufacturers; therfore, they wouldn't be just a US thing. Furthermore, the gov't provides all the roads on which you would be driving. The gov't identifies your car by its license plate. You give your VIN when you register your car so that there is something else to match it against other than the plates if it is stolen, in an accident, etc.
This is no different than other government-mandated identity programs such as Social Security numbers.
Yes it is. One has to have an SSN in the US, no matter what. One doesn't have to own a car (well, in some instances one DOES have to own a car, but people in a large enough metropolitan area don't have to).
Not to get tin-foil-hatty,
too late
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.
A VIN isn't going to lead the SS to your door step. No one knows the VIN on a particular automobile unless they are standing right next to it and looking right at where it is printed. Now if you smash your car into a bus load of orphans, and you flee the scene on foot, then maybe the cops could check the VIN to see to whom the car is registered, and then come arrest you later. Of course, they could just as easily check the license plate.
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?
Maybe, just maybe,
my pet machine
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
>> 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
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.
Is this the perfect
cheap labor conservatives - they want to keep you hungry enough to be thankful for minimum wage.
No need. Carfax has a free service where the basic details come up before you pay for your report on the VIN. Also, people with a subscription can get details on any number of cars for the sub period. Since I just bought a car for my sister, I have a sub... here's a snippet of what carfax says about this VIN:
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
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.
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.
It puts the numbers in the correct boxes, or else it gets the hose again.
All employees must wash hands before seeking equitable relief.