Zero Motorcycles VIN decoder

Every road-legal motorcycle sold in the United States since 1981 carries a 17-character vehicle identification number laid out to the same federal rule. 49 CFR 565.13(b) is one sentence long: "Each VIN shall consist of seventeen (17) characters." Section 565.15 then splits them into four sections: (a) positions 1-3, which "shall uniquely identify the manufacturer and type of the motor vehicle"; (b) positions 4-8, which "shall uniquely identify the attributes of the vehicle"; (c) position 9, the check digit; and (d) positions 10-17. Most decoders describe the same layout as three parts — WMI, descriptor and identifier — by folding the check digit in with the descriptor. Either framing gives the same character boundaries.

Zero Motorcycles follows the rule exactly and fills the discretionary positions with its own scheme. The table below is the map. Every row after it in this article expands one line of it.

Two properties of the standard are worth stating before the tables, because they explain things that otherwise look like gaps. First, the letters I, O and Q are not VIN characters at all — they are excluded by ISO 3779 to stop them being confused with 1 and 0, and you can see the consequence directly in the federal year-code table below, which skips them. Second, 49 CFR 565.15(d) requires that for a motorcycle "the last four (4) characters shall be numeric". Zero goes one better and makes the last five numeric: all 21 VINs in our corpus have digits in positions 13 through 17.

The first three characters are the World Manufacturer Identifier, assigned by the national authority — in the United States, SAE on behalf of NHTSA. Zero holds two of them, and this is the single most confusing thing about Zero VINs, because a Zero whose number starts PAG looks to most software like a different manufacturer entirely.

Both records are public and can be checked in one request each against NHTSA’s Product Information Catalog and Vehicle Listing (vPIC). Retrieved 29 July 2026, verbatim:

49 CFR 565.15(b) is deliberately loose about these five characters: "The second section shall consist of five characters, which occupy positions four through eight (4-8) in the VIN. This section shall uniquely identify the attributes of the vehicle as specified in Table I." Table I asks a motorcycle manufacturer for "Make, type of motorcycle, line, engine type, and net brake horsepower", and leaves the encoding entirely to them. Zero splits the five characters 1 + 2 + 2.

Position 9 is not information about the motorcycle. It is a modulo-11 checksum over the other sixteen characters, and its only purpose is to catch transcription errors. The algorithm is written out in full in the regulation, so there is no ambiguity about it.

49 CFR 565.15(c), verbatim: "This section shall be the check digit whose purpose is to provide a means for verifying the accuracy of any VIN transcription. After all other characters in VIN have been determined by the manufacturer, the check digit shall be calculated by carrying out the mathematical computation specified in paragraphs (c) (1) through (4) of this section."

One character, and the most frequently misread position on any VIN. The code is federally fixed, not a manufacturer choice: 49 CFR 565.15(d)(1) publishes it as Table VII, quoted here verbatim from the current eCFR text.

One character identifying the assembly plant. Twenty of the 21 VINs in our corpus carry C; the single PAG bike carries P.

Our decoder maps C to "Santa Cruz, CA" and leaves every other character null. NHTSA, for the same VINs, reports PlantCity SCOTTS VALLEY, PlantState CALIFORNIA and PlantCompanyName "Zero Motorcyles Inc." — the misspelling is in the federal dataset, not a typo here. Scotts Valley is in Santa Cruz County, a few kilometres from Santa Cruz itself, and Zero has been associated with both addresses; treat the two answers as the same plant.

For PAG VINs the decoder returns early and never reads position 11 at all, so plant_location stays null. NHTSA fills the gap from the WMI instead, reporting BINAN, LAGUNA, PHILIPPINES.

Position 12 is where the regulation stops caring. 49 CFR 565.15(d)(3) says positions 12 through 17 "shall represent the number sequentially assigned by the manufacturer in the production process" for a high-volume manufacturer. Zero uses only 13 through 17 as the sequence and spends position 12 on a model letter — which is legitimate, is consistent across every 538 VIN we have, and is invisible to any decoder that assumes the regulation’s literal reading. That includes NHTSA’s own.

This is the position that makes a Zero-specific decoder worth writing. On a 2016 FXS the model-line code at positions 5-6 is X8, which means "FX or FXS" and resolves nothing; position 12 is J, which means FXS.

Five digits, assigned in production order. 49 CFR 565.15(d) requires the last four characters to be numeric for a motorcycle; Zero makes all five numeric, and all 21 corpus VINs comply.

There is nothing to decode here, but there is something to be careful about. The serial is the only part of a VIN that identifies one specific motorcycle rather than a model, so it is the part that turns a VIN into personal data. Every VIN published on this page and in this project’s documentation has two of its serial characters replaced with XX for that reason, and a masked VIN still decodes correctly because nothing reads positions 13-17.

A practical consequence: NHTSA rejects a masked VIN with error 400, "Invalid Characters Present", and names the offending positions, because X is not a digit. That is a good sanity check that you have masked the number properly before publishing it.

Gen3 — the Cypher III generation, SR/F onwards — broke the position-by-position scheme in two ways at once. Some of those bikes moved to the PAG WMI, and all of them started carrying their identity in a three-character family code at positions 4-6 rather than in the position-12 designator.

The decoder handles the two cases on different paths. A PAG VIN takes an early return: platform is fixed to FST, the pack size comes from the platform character at position 4, the model comes from the family code, and model line, motor and plant are left null because the 538 tables do not apply. A 538 VIN takes the normal path and only falls back to the family code if the position-12 designator produced nothing.

Both examples below are real motorcycles from this project’s log corpus, with two serial characters masked. The tables are generated by running each VIN through the same decoder the widget uses, so what you see here is what the code actually produces, not a hand-written illustration.

Almost every consumer VIN decoder on the web is a wrapper around NHTSA’s vPIC API. It is free, it needs no key, and for Zero Motorcycles it is better than its reputation: it knows the make, the model year, the body class, a series name, a motor rating in kW, a battery size and an electrification level. If you only want to know what year a bike is, vPIC will tell you, and you should use it.

The problems are density and position 12. Here is the complete response profile for the masked 2016 FXS used as the first worked example above, so you can reproduce it exactly:

A VIN is a factory record. It is fixed at build and never updated, which makes it excellent for identity and unreliable for state. Five things in particular are routinely inferred from a Zero VIN and should not be.

The Zero owner community reverse-engineered most of this scheme long before we did, and the best single artefact is vin_decoder.php in the zero-motorcycle-community web-tools repository — a PHP form carrying model-line and motor code tables that overlap heavily with ours. It is worth reading, and it is worth knowing its limits: it is a script rather than a document, so none of the tables inside it are legible without opening the source, and none of it is indexable, which is a large part of why this page exists.

Our tables were checked against three further sources: the decoder in this project’s backend, which is what writes the model and pack fields on every uploaded log; the model tags embedded in Gen3 MBB firmware headers, which independently confirm the family codes; and the 21 real VINs described above. Where the community tables and a real log disagree, the log wins.

This page renders the lookup tables directly from the same TypeScript module the widget calls, which in turn mirrors the Python decoder. There is no second copy to fall out of date. If you find a code we have wrong, or a VIN that decodes to the wrong bike, tell us — a masked VIN and the correct model is enough to fix it.