How to read your VIN to get the right part first time

When somebody sends us a VIN instead of a description, the fitment question is usually answered inside a minute. When they send "it's a 2018 F-250", it takes three messages and sometimes still ends up wrong. Here is why.

Where it is

Three places on most trucks. The driver's door jamb sticker, the lower corner of the windscreen on the driver's side, and the vehicle paperwork. The door jamb sticker is the useful one, because it carries the build date and the axle and trim codes alongside the VIN.

Photograph the whole sticker rather than typing the number out. It takes you five seconds and it removes the chance of a transposed character, which happens more often than you would think with a seventeen character string.

What it actually tells us

The VIN is not random. It encodes the manufacturer, the plant, the model line, the body style, the engine, and the model year, plus a check digit that catches most typing errors.

For our purposes the useful parts are the body style and the model year position, because those two together tell us which generation of panel your truck takes. The door sticker then adds the build date, which is what settles a truck built near a running change.

Why the year on its own is not enough

Manufacturers do not redesign every part every year, and they do not always make changes at the start of a model year. A truck built in August can carry the following year's part. Two trucks with the same year on the title can take different bumpers if one was built before a change and one after.

So "it's a 2018" narrows it down, and the VIN plus the build date finishes the job.

What the VIN does not tell us

Worth being straight about the limits. The VIN does not tell us whether your truck has fog lights, parking sensors or a factory tow package on every model line. Those are options, and on some trucks they are recorded in the option codes on the door sticker and on others they are not.

That is why we still ask you to look at the front of your truck and tell us what holes are in the bumper. Thirty seconds of looking beats any amount of decoding.

What to send us

A photograph of the door jamb sticker, and a photograph of the part currently on the truck. With those two we can confirm fitment on almost anything we list, and if we cannot, we will say so rather than guess.

A note on privacy

A VIN identifies a vehicle, not a person, and we use it only to check interchange. We do not run history reports on it and we do not pass it to anyone. If you would rather not send it, the year, cab, bed length and a photograph of the existing part will get us most of the way there.

The short version

Send the door jamb sticker. It is the single most useful thing you can give a parts counter, and it is the difference between one message and a return shipment.