What do the first three characters of a Tesla VIN mean?

They are the World Manufacturer Identifier. 5YJ is Fremont, California; 7SA is Austin, Texas; 7G2 is Austin for Cybertruck and Semi; LRW is Shanghai; XP7 is Berlin. Any other prefix is not a Tesla.

Can you tell a Tesla's options from the VIN alone?

No. A VIN encodes the model, plant, year and restraint system, but not the options. Free Supercharging, Full Self-Driving and the interior trim live in Tesla's own records and have to be looked up against them.

What is the ninth character of a Tesla VIN?

A check digit — a checksum over the other sixteen characters. A mistyped or invented VIN almost always fails it, so if a listing's VIN does not check out, the listing is wrong before anything else is.

Guide

How to read a Tesla VIN

Seventeen characters, no I, O or Q — they were dropped to avoid confusion with 1 and 0. Some of the positions are genuinely informative. Others are just a serial number, and plenty of what buyers want to know is not encoded at all.

Position	What it carries
1–3	World manufacturer identifier — who built it and where
4	Model line
5	Body type
6	Restraint system
7–8	Drive unit and related configuration
9	Check digit — validates the rest of the number
10	Model year
11	Assembly plant
12–17	Production sequence number

The check digit is a free sanity test

Position nine is calculated from the other sixteen characters. A VIN that fails the check digit has been mistyped or invented. If a listing's VIN does not validate, that is worth a question before anything else.

What a VIN cannot tell you

This is the part most decoders gloss over. The VIN encodes how the car was configured at a structural level — it does not encode what was optioned, what has been added since, or what the current owner has purchased. In particular it will not tell you:

Whether free Supercharging is present, or whether it transfers
Whether Full Self-Driving was bought or is being rented monthly
Battery state of health
What the car cost when new

All of that lives in the vehicle's record rather than in the number itself. A pattern-matching decoder guesses at it from the model year. Reading the actual record does not have to guess.

Where to find the VIN

Base of the windshield on the driver's side, visible from outside the car. Also on the door jamb sticker, on the insurance card, and in most online listings. You do not need the seller's permission to read one.

Decode a real VIN

Option codes, Supercharging, FSD, battery health, original MSRP.

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