Seventeen characters, and the whole regulatory file on the car

Because the NHTSA vPIC catalog behind it is a flat attribute table with no type information — every cell is text. A measured decode of 1HGCM82633A004352 returned modelYear "2003", cylinders "6", horsepower "240" and doors "2", all quoted. We pass them through rather than guessing at conversions, since a bad cast on an ambiguous field is worse than an honest string. Cast at your own boundary and expect empty strings where the catalog has no value.

Yes — use * for the positions you do not know, and pass modelyear to disambiguate. A VIN is 1–17 characters of A–Z and 0–9 with I, O and Q excluded from the alphabet entirely (they look too much like 1 and 0), so a VIN containing any of those three is malformed rather than unknown. The response's decode.errorText tells you exactly what was and was not resolvable, and decode.suggestedVin appears when NHTSA can propose a correction.

Read decode.errorCode, not the presence of fields. A measured clean decode returned errorCode "0" with errorText "0 - VIN decoded clean. Check Digit (9th position) is correct" — that is the 9th character validating the other sixteen arithmetically, which catches transcription errors before you store them. meta.completeness_pct on the same call was 83.3, meaning some catalog fields were empty for that vehicle; that is normal for older cars and is not a decode failure.

It is the VIN with the individual serial masked out — measured: 1HGCM826*3A for 1HGCM82633A004352. It still identifies the make, model, body and engine family, but not the specific car. If you are caching decode results, keying on the descriptor gives you a cache hit across every vehicle of that configuration and keeps a personally-identifying VIN out of your logs.

Call fuel_economy_options with year, make and model to list the EPA trims and their ids, then call fuel_economy with the id you want. Passing year, make and model straight to fuel_economy auto-resolves and returns one row per trim in vehicles[] — a measured 2021 Honda Accord lookup returned count 1 with id 43361, trim "Automatic (variable gear ratios)", vehicleClass "Large Cars", 30/38/33 MPG and annualFuelCostUsd 1850. EPA coverage starts at 1984.

USD per kilowatt-hour, while every other key in that object is USD per US gallon. A measured call returned regular 4.1, midgrade 4.68, premium 5.07, diesel 5.31, e85 2.63, cng 2.96, lpg 3.42 and electric 0.15 — and that last figure is only coherent as a per-kWh rate. All eight arrive as quoted strings. These are US national averages at the time you call, not regional prices, so do not use them for a local cost estimate.

vin_decode_batch takes up to 50 per call and is flexible about the input shape: a 'VIN,year;VIN,year' string, an array of bare VIN strings, an array of [VIN, year] pairs, or an array of {vin, modelyear} objects. Each result carries its own vin, vehicle and decode block, so a VIN that fails to decode does not affect the other 49 — check each row's decode.errorCode individually.

vin_decode_flat returns one row per NHTSA variable — variable name, its label, the value, plus variableId and valueId — instead of the tidied nested vehicle object. Use it when you want a field the curated shape does not surface, or when you need NHTSA's own numeric ids to join against another government dataset. raw: true on vin_decode is the middle ground: you keep the nested object and additionally get the full flat attribute row (around 130 fields) under attributes.

Vehicle Data API is a ReefAPI endpoint group for vehicle data It returns live JSON through POST requests under /vehicle/v1.

Yes. ReefAPI starts with 1,000 free credits, no card required. Vehicle Data calls use the same shared credit balance as every other ReefAPI engine.

No login to Vehicle Data is needed for the API response. You call ReefAPI with your x-api-key header, and the playground can run live examples before you create a production key.

The page example is captured from a live vin_decode call, and production requests fetch live data through ReefAPI rather than a static sample.

Vehicle Data actions currently cost 1-2 credits per successful call. Failed or blocked calls are free, and all APIs draw from one credit pool.

Yes. Connect ReefAPI once through MCP and your assistant can call vehicle actions with the same key, credit pool and JSON envelope used by normal REST requests.