Temporary VIN Confusion

Hoping some more experienced members here can help me out here.

Put a deposit on a 2025 TRD sport last week. Dealer said it was built on 1/9/25, with a delivery window of 1/22-2/12. They say it’s currently in the “processing” phase. They gave me a VIN number to get insurance set up.

3TMLB5JN8SM04C614

Through research in this forum, I come to find out this is not the final VIN and just a prebuild temporary VIN. I dug into decoding the VIN more and apparently this truck shouldn’t even be built yet since the 04 indicates it will be built in the 4th week of the year. And the M designates it was built in Tijuana and not Guanajuato. Which maybe means faster delivery?


So I’m a little confused about what’s going on here since I’ve never bought a car that wasn’t already on the lot:

1. Is it normal for trucks to be built 3 weeks ahead of schedule?
2. And is the given delivery window realistic given the build date of 1/9? Seems a rather fast turnaround coming out of Mexico to the Northeast of the US.

 

If it’s in the processing phase it was probably built within the last day or so.

It took about 3 weeks for my truck to be delivered to the rail yard in MD i believe where it sat on QA hold for a other week or so

 

I got bogus VINs from two dealers before I finally found my truck on the lot of the sixth dealer that I went to over an eleven month search.

One of those dealers took a $1000 deposit. They returned it when I got tired of their stall tactics, cancelled my request, and demanded refund of my deposit. Months later, the salesman sent me a picture and said that they finally had the truck that they had promised me was already built and on it's way. I did not reply.

The second dealer tried the hard sell on "dealer installed upgrades" includeing nitrogen in the tires and a car tracking system that they "install on every car that arrives on their lot". What bullshit.

The dealer I bought my truck from did none of that shit and discounted the MSRP by $2000.

I'm happy with my purchase and my dealer, who will get all the future business for my Tacoma. Heck I even bought the oil filter for my 900 mile oil change from them. I already had the oil.
j.

 

Based on what you told me, I think I either got a bogus vin or it isn’t a bogus vin and the delivery window they gave me is not accurate. I don’t see how they could tell me 1/22-2/12 delivery if it’s not even built yet. They claim built 1/9 but the temp vin says otherwise. I will let 1/22 come and then give them a call to see if they can give me a better answer

 

If it was just built then there would be the real vin, not a temp vin.

 

see if they’ll send you a picture of the vehicle tracker

should look like this

 

You might call the dealer and ask why a truck that's built isn't on their webpage and why they don't have the final VIN.

 

Ok, so some of the responses from you guys have confirmed my suspicions about all this. Will call the dealer and see if they can send me a timeline and elaborate on why a truck that was supposedly built almost two weeks ago doesn’t have a vin or is not showing up on the website.

They did send me the vspec with the temp vin so another possibility is they haven’t followed up on it since I put the deposit down and are just going to wait until it shows up.

 

Dealers are out to make money. They already have your deposit so they are working someone else. Hence very little communication. In their eyes the truck hasn’t been delivered and thus there is no need to communicate the vin yet. They’ll either reach out to you with the vin or call your agent (if you gave them that info) directly when the vehicle is ready for delivery.

 

3TM means (Mexico/Toyota/Baja Plant).
Digits 4-8 are model/trim codes.
9th digit is a checksum to detect bogus VINs. Yours is bogus because the 14th position is a "C", which is an invalid character.
10th digit is year. Yours is "S" which makes it a 2025
11-17 are used by the MFR to identify that particular vehicle. A serial number, but not necessarily sequential.

The "4" before the "C" doesn't mean built the 4th week of the year. Look at the list of VINs affected by the transmission TSB. Note all the "0's" in that position. What week is that? The "4" as the 17th digit doesn't mean production week either.

The "C" in the 14th position is the problem character. Could have been a production placeholder, but the real VIN will have a number there. That's what you need to focus on with the dealer.

 

Yep makes sense. I don’t want to bother them either since it’s not going to make the truck arrive faster. Just new to the process. I think it’s fair to check in once we hit the start of the delivery window they claimed, also trying to sell my

 

I understand this a temporary vin since there is a letter in the last 6. It gets decoded a little differently than a final vin. But I’ve read multiple posts on here that said the first two digits after the M meant build week. It seems to have lined up for everyone else but seems kind of off in this case

 

You are correct, he is wrong about temp vins.

 

thanks for confirming

 

He's wrong about me being wrong. Does that constitute confirmation?

My post is about actual VINs, which your number above isn't.

Actual VINs list year, not build week - unless "00" is a build week.

 

I said you are wrong about temp VINs. The first part of your post was about the actual VIN once it is produced. The 2nd part of your post:


The "4" before the "C" doesn't mean built the 4th week of the year. Look at the list of VINs affected by the transmission TSB. Note all the "0's" in that position. What week is that? The "4" as the 17th digit doesn't mean production week either.

The "C" in the 14th position is the problem character. Could have been a production placeholder, but the real VIN will have a number there. That's what you need to focus on with the dealer.

Is the part about temp VINs where I am saying you are wrong. 04C614 shows the build week of week 4 and C614 is the job number. What you have about the actual VIN is correct, it does not show the build week. What you have about temp VINs is not.

 

Cool. I wasn't talking about "temp VINs", which you can tell from the previous portion you omitted.

"9th digit is a checksum to detect bogus VINs. Yours is bogus because the 14th position is a "C", which is an invalid character."

The number he was given as a VIN isn't really a VIN. Can't get insurance with it, can't register it. It's an internal number Toyota uses. Call it a "temp VIN" or "bogus VIN", makes no difference to me. It ain't a VIN.

 

Not sure if this info helps, but I had a temp VIN for my 21 OR well before it was built. Once it was built, the moment it shipped out, my temp VIN vanished from the Toyota system, and it felt like my truck was lost in shipping. 2 days later, my dealer emailed me with the real VIN and delivery ETA, which was three weeks out. Then in about 10 days they called to tell me my Truck was on their lot. Not sure if things have changed without COVID messing everything up, but back then, none of the date ETAs they gave me held up.

 

thanks, this does help understand things a bit. I think part of it is my dealer is a high volume dealer so as one poster suggested, they probably wont worry about it until my truck physically shows up on their lot.

so they estimated 3 weeks for delivery and the actual delivery was 10 days? That’s impressive, I’m guessing location plays a part and you might be on the west coast?

 

Yeah, my dealer was literally on the West Coast, a few hundred feet from the pacific ocean. (Newport Oregon). Only draw back was that they are about 60 miles from my home, and when they called Thursday Morning, they asked me to pick it up before they closed on Friday due to limited storage and security concerns with them being closed all weekend. My girlfriend was in conference call meetings all week so that left me scrambling to find transportation out there on really short notice - but since they were kind enough not to add any markups to it and charged me MSRP during the chip shortage when everyone else was price gouging, I didn't mind so much.