Every improvement we ship to the decoder, in plain words.
A breakthrough in how our decoder works: instead of only recognizing VINs it has seen before, it has now extracted the underlying construction grammar manufacturers use - which positions encode the model, chassis and engine family for Honda, BMW, Renault, Mazda, Nissan and Subaru. Proven on thousands of held-out combinations at up to 100% accuracy and stress-tested against real-world registrations before going live, this means the decoder can correctly identify vehicles it has literally never encountered - because it understands the logic, not just the examples.
A generation-blind rule was assigning the newest Odyssey engine to every North American Odyssey, and our own safety rails were catching the contradiction and hiding the engine rather than serving a wrong one. The chassis code inside the VIN itself now selects the correct engine for each generation - from the 1999 original through the current model - with the mid-2000s generation honestly reporting the engine family where the exact variant depends on trim.
We connected millions of official factory build records (Nissan, Subaru, Mazda, Volkswagen Group) straight into the decoder's brain. It learned over 10,000 new VIN patterns from the people who built the cars.
The decoder's factory knowledge grew from 10,000 to 56,000 learned patterns in one day. BMW type codes, Honda's per-market engine ladders, Renault's own decoding rules, BYD prefixes and Mitsubishi production records now resolve directly from the VIN.
We distilled the world's parts catalogues into an engine dictionary: which engine belongs to which chassis code, straight from manufacturer data. Fourteen more cars in our verification library now show their exact engine - with zero new errors.
Vehicles imported from Japan carry government type-designation codes, and our decoder now reads their official grammar: it can tell petrol, diesel, hybrid, plug-in hybrid and electric apart directly from the designation prefix, and for Renault models it reads the exact engine code embedded in the designation itself. Every new mapping was verified against official Japanese market specifications before going live.
We tested our model-year decoding against 60 million manufacturer build records. The industry-standard year encoding was confirmed for 92 manufacturer codes with over 98% agreement, and we mapped exactly which manufacturers do not encode a year in the VIN, so the decoder never guesses where the data is not there.
When a Renault VIN arrives with a wrong model name attached from a polluted data source, the decoder now recognizes the conflict and serves the model that Renault's own factory grammar proves for that VIN - while carefully preserving trim variants and verified data.
We ran a full independent audit of how the decoder learns, and raised the bar: our internal accuracy benchmark is now strictly separated from all training data, every learning pipeline enforces that separation automatically, and a handful of under-evidenced mappings were retired until stronger independent proof arrives. Where retiring a mapping could have exposed stale third-party data, new coherence safeguards now catch it - so a petrol car can never be served a diesel engine. Accuracy numbers we report are now provably earned, never memorized.
For 1.5 million Volkswagen, Audi, SKODA, SEAT and Porsche vehicles, the decoder now consults the manufacturer's own production record for that exact car - returning the precise factory engine code, model year and even the build date, instead of an educated guess. When your VIN is in the factory books, you get the factory answer.
Renault encodes its model type in every VIN, and we now pair that with the manufacturer's own production calendar for each type - nearly 5,800 model variants gained factory build-year windows. When a VIN's year letter claims a year the factory provably never built that model, the decoder now says so honestly instead of passing the error through.
We audited every data source the decoder learns from, field by field, and recovered value that earlier pipelines had silently dropped: factory build-year windows now cover all Nissan and Subaru learned keys, Honda coverage quadrupled by handling the factory's wildcard notation, BYD coverage doubled, Australian displacement and body-style evidence turned back on across 200,000 listings, and several subtle data-reading bugs were fixed - including one that could label hybrid vehicles as petrol.
When the specs on file (size, cylinders, fuel, power) match exactly one engine ever made for that brand, the decoder now names it - verified against real registration documents before release.
Ghost, Phantom, Cullinan, and every modern Maybach (S550 to S680, GLS600) now decode with the exact factory engine, power and torque.
New safeguards stop one mislabeled foreign record from contaminating a whole model family - the error that once showed petrol cars as diesels.
Infiniti, Acura, classic Mercedes and AMG, Opel, European and Thai-built Fords, Land Rover, Lada and more - each fixed for the whole model family, permanently.