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Highest production VIN in the wild
- Thread starter insaneoctane
- Start date
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- Tags
- Model 3
tsunamiofhurt
Member
Tesla will begin assigning MY2018 VINs on December 22nd, 2017. Here's the VIN decoder posted by NHTSA a week ago for MY2018 (10th digit corresponds to the model year). H = 2017, J = 2018.
Gtoffo
Member
Agreed.
Also VINs include several digits that are dependant on configuration (e.g. dual or single motor etc.), production, and model year. So they can only be assigned once the configuration has been confirmed by the client and production has been planned.
Otherwise the car might end up having a VIN with the wrong configuration, fall into the wrong model year (if used too far in the future) or assigned to the wrong plant (in the future...hopefully).
So VIN assignation should be a good general indicator at this stage. At least to signal significant production start.
I don't know how fast the VINs become public though...there may be a substantial lag there. They may become public even AFTER delivery.
Do we have any certainty on this? (eg. the registry MUST be searchable at least from day one of delivery by law).
tsunamiofhurt
Member
No law that I'm aware of but I would be surprised if it was AFTER delivery.
Right now the way we determine whether a VIN is valid/registered is by querying the NHTSA recall tool which is designed for consumers to enter their VIN and see whether or not there is a recall for their vehicle. From the tool - "Every vehicle has a unique VIN. Enter a VIN to learn if a specific vehicle needs to be repaired as part of a recall." As this is safety related, I imagine they would make this available as soon as the VIN has been registered by the manufacturer. Further confirmation can be seen in the long lag time between registration data and VIN spotting of deliveries.
So, has anyone searched for any 2018 VINs? I would think that they could still reserve a block of them since they won't be doing dual motors until later in the year. And, searching for a dual motor VIN to show up would give a good indication on them getting ready to introduce dual motors.
I ordered my Model X in September 2016, but requested delayed delivery to March 2017. My car was first assigned a 2016 VIN, but the VIN was subsequently altered (the character representing model year changed, the sequence number and everything else was left untouched) to reflect that it was manufactured in jan 2017.
In other words, I don't think we should rule out that assigned 2017 model 3 VINs could magically change into 2018 VINs if the production doesn't ramp swiftly enough.
Gtoffo
Member
Agreed. That's why those indicators should be used only to asses the GENERAL trend. Certainly not an indication of precise numbers of units due to all the uncertainties we have discussed.
Waiting4M3
Active Member
IMO the most likely scenario is that Tesla reports the VINs when they stage parts and start producing a batch of cars, and use the VINs to track parts assigned to each car. I suspect that they have room to batch ~1200 cars in the Fremont factory at a time. In late Oct they registered the next batch of 1000 cars beyond #1134, then shortly after we started seeing VIN > #1000 delivered in early Nov. My guess is that Tesla was (mostly) done with the cars up to #1134 in late Oct, and they were moving those out of the factory to start on the next batch (>#1134), and registered the new VINs then.
I expect the same this time, now that the next 1200 VINs are registered, we should start to see >#1135 coming out soon. I also expect Tesla to be done with total of ~3K-5K employee cars within the next 3-4 weeks so they can start deliver the non-employee cars. VINS up to #3840 were registered right before the non-employee configuration opened, so maybe that covers the last of employee car configurations, and the next batch of VINs to be registered will be non-employee orders, and we may also see email from Tesla to those buyers when their VINs are assigned.
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Yeah, most of all - if 2017 or 2018 year. Which begs the question - Can it be a 2017 VIN, but delivery happens after Dec 31st? And IRS requests VIN number so that may be the qualifier for the tax credit.
I don’t think the IRS cares about VINs, they want to know when the car is put into service.
RTPEV
Active Member
Well they do care about the VINs, or at least they ask for it. I don't think they decode it to determine the year of the vehicle. They ask for when the vehicle was placed into service, and I think this is the determining factor they care about. After all, you could purchase a 2017 model year vehicle (with 2017 VIN) in 2018 and not be eligible to file for your tax credit until 2019.
I had orignally thought/hoped that they would use the VIN numbers to uniquely identify credits claimed and would use that number to count up to the 200,000 vehicle mark rather than US sales reported by the manufacturer (who would have no idea whether the buyer actually went through and claimed the credit). This would mean, for example, that even though Tesla sold 160,000 vehicles in the US to date, if only 140,000 had claimed credits, that we are farther from 200K than we think. But in the end, I think they just use the VIN as a tracking number to make sure that the credit is not claimed twice for the same vehicle.
McHoffa
CyberOwners
The wording is 200,000 qualifying vehicles sold in the US, not 200,000 vehicles claimed to the IRS (unfortunately)
McHoffa
CyberOwners
Hmmm.... we're not tracking too far away from my predictions from back in June. I had called for a cumulative of 1600 cars built by end of November.
