Show HN: I built an offline VIN decoder using the NHTSA vPIC dataset

4 points by samsullivan 7 months ago · 0 comments · 1 min read

I wanted to open source the VIN decoder I built for the car ownership platform I'm building. It uses a custom variant of the NHTSA vPIC database https://vpic.nhtsa.dot.gov/api/ ported to sqlite, its fully offline and works right out of the box, I got the <300MB SQL Server database down to about 46MB. Hope this helps anyone looking for a VIN decoder, most use the NHTSA api but AFAIK this is the only version thats offline and using a custom version of the db. For a v2 I wanted to generate a dataset of basically every 'nano vin' (the check digit in position 9 and last 6 digits are arbitrary) and the corresponding make model year trim mappings. I ran some estimates and it would fit pretty comfortably in a modern VMs memory. Hope this is useful for anyone working in the space.

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