**2. Material and methods**

The globally unique VIN identifier (*Vehicle Identification Number*) is defined worldwide using internationally valid ISO 3779:1983 standards (since 1986) – *Road vehicles -- Vehicle identification number (VIN) -- Content and structure*; ISO 3780:1983 – *Road vehicles -- World manufacturer identifier (WMI) code*, and ISO 4030:19831983 – *Road vehicles -- Vehicle identification number (VIN) -- Location and attachment.* The mentioned standards specify and implement the unambiguous vehicle identification worldwide.

A VIN is a string of alphanumeric characters of the precise length of 17 characters. To avoid visual similarity and inaccuracies, the O, Q, and I characters are prohibited. The VIN has three basic components (see **Figures 2** and **3**):

*Impact of Digital Vehicle Identification Errors on Critical Information Systems DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.107888*

#### **Figure 2.**

*Example of the diversity of VIN identifier structures used by different vehicle manufacturers. Some German or Italian manufacturers include meaningless strings like ZZZ, XX, or 000 in the VIN structure. Source: Roman Rak.*

• **WMI**—**World Manufacturer Identifier.** Three-character sequences identify the vehicle manufacturer (factory make). This part is internationally standardized.


#### **Figure 3.**

*Example of VIN decoding of a BMW vehicle using the VINexpert application. In the left column, there is a list of allowable values for every VIN position for specific logical sections of the identifier (family of the vehicle, position of steering wheel, etc.). Source: Roman Rak.*


A data sample of 4,059,009 records from the Vehicle Inspection Register managed by the Ministry of Transport of the Czech Republic was used for the VIN quality analysis. The data sample is valid as of 31 December 2018.

The VIN distressed vehicle in a fraction of a second, without having to link to the various national registers of every EU member state.

The VINdecoder application is based on special algorithms and knowledge database. This database contains VIN structures and related vehicle information.
