SpareRadar MINI GCC spec check

MINI VINs: BMW's scheme, with one important difference

MINI is built by BMW and read with BMW's rules, except at the one position that matters most to anyone trying to date a car.

Runs the free GCC spec check on your own vehicle. Nothing is stored against your name.
Is a MINI GCC spec?
The honest answer, before anything else on this page.

GCC specification is decided per vehicle, not per model. Two cars of the same model and the same year, built in the same factory in the same week, can go to different markets. So no page can tell you whether yours is a Gulf car, and this one does not try. What it can do is show you exactly what your own VIN encodes and where that stops.

How MINI builds a VIN outside America
The scheme, and why a general decoder struggles with it.

MINI VINs begin WMW and are decoded with the BMW type code at positions 4 to 7 and the same conforming check digit at position 9.

The difference is position 10. On a BMW-badged rest-of-world car it is the literal digit 0 and there is no year in the VIN at all. European MINIs do carry a real model year code there. That single divergence is why the decoder keeps a per-brand rule instead of one European rule, and it is the sort of detail that separates a correct answer from a plausible one.

Position by position
What each character carries on this maker's cars.
4 to 7
The BMW type code, or Typschluessel
Four characters that resolve model, chassis, body and engine in one field. This is exactly the field the American reference cannot read, because BMW never filed these cars with the American regulator. On a US-market BMW positions 4 to 7 are not the plain type code, so the lookup only runs when the rest-of-world marker is present.
9
A genuine check digit
Europe does not mandate one, but BMW computes a conforming mod-11 digit anyway. Every sampled European BMW and MINI validates, which turns this into a free typo detector on exactly the VINs where there is otherwise least to say.
10
The literal digit 0 on a rest-of-world BMW
Not a year code, and not even a member of the year alphabet. The model year is simply not in the VIN. The decoder returns no year and shows the type code's production window separately, because promoting a window into a year would be fabricating data.
11
Plant
Read from BMW's own filed plant letters. Where a letter means different plants for BMW and for Rolls-Royce, the decoder keeps separate tables rather than one that is right half the time.
World manufacturer identifiers
The first three characters, and the entity behind each. Country is where the vehicle was built, which is not where it was sold.
WMIBuilt byCountry of manufacture
WMWBMW AGGermany
What this decoder covers, and what it does not
Coverage claims here trail capability. If it is not listed, it does not resolve.

Make and manufacturer from the WMI, the shared BMW check digit, and the model year where position 10 carries one.

  • The type-code table was built from BMW-badged chassis codes, so a MINI-specific model rarely resolves from positions 4 to 7.
  • European MINI position 10 has not been independently verified against a set of real VINs, and is carried on documentation rather than on measurement.

Check a specific MINI

The free GCC spec check reads a VIN and gives a verdict with a certainty score and the evidence behind it. The full VIN decoder returns every attribute the decode resolves, with the source of each one.