Publisher's Note: Welcome to our 44th edition of Tech Tips Tuesday on "Unlocking Secrets with VIN Decoding Tips".  We'll be re-publishing an edition of AMSOIL Tech Tips for you every Tuesday.  Click on the Blog Category "AMSOIL" to see everything published to-date.

Unlocking Secrets with VIN Decoding Tips

John Gardner: Now, your VIN (Vehicle Identification Number) can tell you a lot about your vehicle. Welcome to this AMSOIL Tech Tip. Yep, we're talking about the VIN. Where is it located? Well, it can either be through the driver's side window on the dashboard there, where you can look through and see it, or in the door jamb.

But there's a lot to it; there's a lot going on in the VIN. You can see it all starts over here, but there are two places I want to look at. The 8th digit, that's the engine type, that's important.

You could have a 3.4 dual overhead cam, or you can have a 3.4 cam and block, so you want to look there to decipher what your engine is. And the 10th digit represents the year, and you can see here your 10th digit can go all the way through the alphabet, numerically and start all over again, and you can tell exactly what year it is. But AMSOIL made it even easier. Can you navigate and show us about our specific vehicle?

Len Groom: We sure can. Let's pick a vehicle here today. We'll just take a look. Let's just pick a random popular vehicle because we've got a tab right on our website. You click on it, it's going to ask you to enter the vehicle, so you can put in anything from a light truck, a car, motorcycles, ATV, UTV, we've got it all on there.

So for today's purposes, we'll pick an auto/light truck. Let's pick a later model, how about a 2019 Chevy, and then we'll go ahead and let's pick a pickup truck with a 5.3 L engine. What'll happen is it actually pulls up the entire product line for this vehicle, so any of the oils that'll work, it has the quantities available, and then it also allows you to build a kit. So we've got a virtual kit there as well. So if you want a filter, you want the right amount of oil, you just click "kit".

John Gardner: Now, this is huge, so we're not going back and forth to the auto part store, "Oh, I forgot this, I forgot that." Everything's there. What's actually located in the kit?

Len Groom: The kit will contain all the oil it needs, so you pick the type of oil that you want from our Signature Series, our high mileage oil, any one of the oils you can pick that works in this vehicle. You go ahead and click on it. The filter, everything is there that you need.

Now, if you want to go further, you can click on the transmission, and we can find out what transmission it has, what products we're looking for, and you can add it to your cart right from there. Very simple, scroll a little bit further, oh, what do you know, there's your differential that pops up, transfer case, it's all there. We figured we'd make it as easy as you possibly can to get that product into the customer's hands.

John Gardner: Wow, bam, just that easy.

Unlocking Secrets with VIN Decoding Tips