Technology
RideVise uses AI to help people buy a used car safely. It is being built in phases — this page separates what runs today, and how you can verify it yourself, from what is still in development.
Live today
A VIN decoder that runs entirely in your browser.
The decoder on the home page reads a Vehicle Identification Number the way the standards define it: positions 1–3 identify the manufacturer (World Manufacturer Identifier, ISO 3780), positions 4–8 describe the vehicle, position 9 is a check digit, position 10 encodes the model year, position 11 the assembly plant, and 12–17 the serial number (ISO 3779).
The check digit is required for vehicles sold in North America by U.S. federal rule 49 CFR Part 565. Each character is converted to a number, multiplied by a fixed weight, and the sum is divided by 11; the remainder must equal position 9 (a remainder of 10 is written as X). A mistyped or invented VIN fails this arithmetic.
Deterministic by design: no language model is involved, so nothing can be hallucinated. The decoder states only what the seventeen characters prove, and marks what they cannot.
Verify it yourself
- Open your browser's developer tools, go to the Network tab, and type a VIN on the home page: no request is made. The manufacturer table and the arithmetic ship with the page.
- Change one character of a valid VIN: the check digit fails immediately.
- Try the worked example below with any VIN — the computation is the same code the home page runs.
Worked example
The check digit, computed in front of you.
| Pos. | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Char | 1 | H | G | C | M | 8 | 2 | 6 | 3 | 3 | A | 0 | 0 | 4 | 3 | 5 | 2 |
| Value | 1 | 8 | 7 | 3 | 4 | 8 | 2 | 6 | 3 | 3 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 4 | 3 | 5 | 2 |
| Weight | 8 | 7 | 6 | 5 | 4 | 3 | 2 | 10 | 0 | 9 | 8 | 7 | 6 | 5 | 4 | 3 | 2 |
| Product | 8 | 56 | 42 | 15 | 16 | 24 | 4 | 60 | 0 | 27 | 8 | 0 | 0 | 20 | 12 | 15 | 4 |
- Sum of products
- 311 mod 11 = 3
- Expected position 9
- 3
- Actual position 9
- 3
Valid — the VIN passes its check digit.
Decoded from the structure
- Manufacturer
- Honda
- Assembled in
- United States
- Model year
- 2003
- Plant code
- A
In development
What the full report adds — and the rule it follows.
- Public safety data: open recalls and complaint patterns from NHTSA's free public datasets (vPIC, Recalls, Complaints).
- Vehicle history from a licensed data provider, and a fair-price band computed from comparable listings — replacing the illustrative example band on the home page.
- A multi-agent AI layer that turns those records into plain language, red flags and a negotiation plan, in English, Portuguese or Spanish.
- The rule: records decide, the model explains. Every finding in a report must cite the source it came from; a claim without a source is not shown.
Engineering practice
- The decoding logic is covered by unit tests, including a known-valid VIN and the same VIN with position 9 tampered.
- Security defaults are fail-closed: an endpoint that cannot enforce its protections refuses the request instead of degrading silently.
- Visitor privacy: the decoder never transmits the VIN you type. Analytics are cookieless.