So if a car im planning to buy has a 13 digit vin number. I have ran into some problems( spent over $50) on carfax, and other VIN websites but they dont seem to work for a 13 digit VIN…any help would be appreciated.
This may or may not work, but have you tried just entering the number directly into Google? If necessary, you might also add “VIN” to the search string.
Umm…I think every car made to be sold in the US has a 17 character VIN, since at least 1982 and probably earlier. Is it older, made for a foreign market, or are you not in the US? Otherwise, I think you may have missed some digits.
Its a 1977 car, cars from 1980 and above get the 17 digit vins…
Search for something like <i>vintage dodge vin</i>.
What kind of car is it?
Its a 1977 Cadillac Deville and the VIN is 6D69S7E653046
6 – Cadillac
D – DeVille
69 – Sedan/4 Door/Pillar
S – 425 CID Engine, 180 HP, 4bbl carb
7 – 1977 Model Year
E – Linden Manufacturing Plant
653046 – Production Sequence Number
I’m going to take a guess (and it’s just a guess because I’ve never used Carfax) that if you can’t get a report because of the short VIN, that no one has reported anything to any of these reporting sites for the same reason. Individual dealers or repair places probably have their own records if they did any work on it, but none of that is uploaded (or at least not in an easily searchable way*) to a central database like Carfax.
*As I type that, I realize that you might try calling Carfax, maybe there some standard prefix that gets used to fill in the unused digits in cases like these. But still, even if that is the case, I wouldn’t be surprised if someone at a body shop goes to report work they’ve done, Carfax (etc) doesn’t accept the VIN and they don’t bother with it.
I was thinking you wanted to check what the VIN told you about the car.
I see that you might be interested in checking repair history, titling history, etc. It wouldn’t surprise me if all the databases and systems that deal with this have been set up for 17-digit VIN’s and simply ignore the existence of earlier vehicles because they didn’t think about, or didn’t want to deal with, other VIN configurations.
Experian Autocheck used to run 13 digit VINs but it apparently it no longer works. Even if you could pull a full history, it wouldn’t tell you anything much about what happened to the car prior to about 1990, except possible title changes. If you want to know if the car has had chassis damage in the past, assume it has.
Man, the 70s were tough.
Really, really tough. Cadillac put a 500 cubic inch engine into their cars that, in its final year of production, put out a whopping 190 horsepower. Torque was predictably high at 390 lb-ft, but in a 5000 lb. car it still took all day to get to highway speeds. This was the result of a big reduction in compression ratios due to the switch to unleaded gasoline combined with early emissions equipment and a previous switch from SAE Gross to SAE Net horsepower ratings.
Every automaker suffered severely in the '70s. Hell, the Corvette dropped to as low as 165 horsepower in 1976 California emissions compliant models. Today is the true Golden Age of performance.
Yeah, but at least it got 8mpg while doing it! 
Yeah, I had a '73 Chevelle with a 350 that I believe was cranking out a whopping 145hp. It didn’t keep my out of trouble specifically, but there wasn’t a whole lot to work with.
Anything with a non-standard VIN is so old that any Carfax information will be only a tiny amount of its total history. Do they even submit Carfax on older cars worked on by independent mechanics?
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Reported.