vin-decode

Auto-updating VIN decoder. Lookup data is regenerated monthly from the official NHTSA vPIC dump by a CI cron job and shipped embedded in the crate. No network at runtime, no manual provisioning, no stale tables.

VIN parsing and decoding for Rust, backed by the full NHTSA vPIC database compiled into fst + rkyv memory-mapped lookup tables.

Example

use vin_decode::Decoder;

let dec = Decoder::new()?;
let v = dec.decode("1HGCM82633A004352")?;
assert_eq!(v.make.as_deref(), Some("Honda"));
assert_eq!(v.model_year, Some(2003));
# Ok::<(), vin_decode::Error>(())

Catalog (browse all known makes / models)

use vin_decode::Catalog;

let cat = Catalog::new()?;
for make in cat.all_makes() {
    println!("{make}");
}
let models = cat.models_for_make("Honda");
# Ok::<(), vin_decode::Error>(())

Features

Feature	Default	Effect
`embedded`	yes	Bundles compressed lookup tables; auto-installs on first decoder construction
`parallel`	yes	`rayon`-powered batch decoding
`serde`	no	`serde::{Serialize, Deserialize}` on `Vehicle`, `Vin`, `BodyClass`, `FuelType`
`build`	no	Exposes the FST/CSV build pipeline (used by CI)

Data freshness

A weekly GitHub Actions job probes https://vpic.nhtsa.dot.gov/downloads/vPICList_lite_YYYY_MM.bak.zip for new NHTSA dumps (NHTSA publishes a fresh one mid-month). A new release is only cut when a newer dump exists — if the upstream version matches the bundled one, the job exits without committing, tagging, or publishing. So a cargo update only ever pulls actual data changes; no churn-publishes.

Crate patch versions track data updates; crate minor versions track API changes.

License