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Comment by indianSummer | Hacker News Reader

I own a rare collector car with a three-digit VIN. This has caused endless hassles at the DMV as well as the insurance office. Sometimes we find success by prepending the necessary number of zeros, before the VIN. Other instances in the same system require appending zeros after the VIN. The true VIN has a hyphen but that never makes it into the DMV's system. One time I got stuck in a particularly nasty loop where the DMV mailed over thirty notices claiming the register would expire on 01/01/0000.

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I had a car—a 1971 Toyota Landcruiser FJ55–that technically had a tilde(~) in the VIN. It was in the format: FJ55~123456. When I bought it, the title had the VIN as FJ550123456. I just accepted and ignored it for a while, but when I decided to sell the car, given that most of my potential buyers were out of state (and in most states, out of state purchases require a VIN inspection) I tried to get it fixed. After six months of working The motor vehicles department here, getting an inspection by state police, and everything else, I found out that their software couldn’t handle and non-alpha numeric characters. In the end they decided to change the title to FJ55123456 so it skipped the tilde but didn’t replace it with a character that didn’t exist on the vehicle.

>I own a rare collector car with a three-digit VIN. This has caused endless hassles at the DMV as well as the insurance office.

I have a similar problem with my own identity. I was born in Canada's smallest province, PEI, and now live in its largest, Ontario. Some Ontario government software seems to have problems recognizing the relatively low numbers on PEI birth certificates.

Which numbers?

Hmm, is this just because it is so few digits? I've had plenty of classic cars that have commission numbers with between six and twelve digits instead of VINs, and haven't ever had any issue with the DMV here in MA.

I used to work for ClassicCars.com ... there's a LOT of variation to VINs before 1980, they standardized in the early-mid 70's, used to know the specific year.

Is it possible to register it as a "custom" with a completely new (and more friendly to the systems) VIN?

What car is it?

It must be a car manufactured before VIN standardization in 1981, at the very least.

I'll give you 999 guesses.

*998

900

Numbers 0..99 are not three-digit.

Ah, but VINs aren’t numbers. (Never mind what the N stands for.) 000 would be perfectly valid.

Impossible in Switzerland at least

Digits, not numbers... I guess a VIN can still be 007, or 054. Right?

997

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