A VIN describes how a vehicle was built. It cannot describe where it was shipped, and no decoder anywhere changes that. The free GCC spec check reads your VIN, gives a verdict with a certainty score and the evidence behind it, and lists the physical and documentary checks that settle what the VIN cannot, starting with the GSO conformity lookup. The full VIN decoder returns every attribute the decode resolves, and the Mercedes-Benz page explains the scheme above position by position.
Common questions
Does a Mercedes E-Class VIN show the model year?
Not on a rest-of-world car. Position 10 is the steering side, where 1 and 5 mean left-hand drive and 2 and 6 mean right-hand drive. Because those are all valid model-year characters, a decoder that does not know the difference will confidently report a year that can be a decade out. This decoder suppresses it and reports the Baureihe production window instead.
Why did an online decoder give my old Mercedes the wrong year?
Almost certainly because it read the tenth character as a model year when on a rest-of-world Mercedes that position is the steering side. The digits Mercedes uses there, 1, 2, 5 and 6, are all valid year characters, so there is nothing to alert a decoder that it is looking at the wrong field. The error is typically a multiple of ten years.