Hey guys! I’m new to the forum and I just bought a 71 Buick Skylark about a week ago. All of my paper work says the car is a 71, title and all but when I decoded my Vin it says it’s a 72?? Is this normal? The vin number is 4D37H2G117064 if anyone could shed some light on this for me I’d really appreciate it! Sorry if I posted this in the wrong section!
Yep, VIN says it’s a 72. Someone messed up at the title office. Not sure what the “H” stands for. That digit is for engine code according to my book and “H” is not listed. Hopefully someone else will chime in.
Thank you so much for helping me out! That’s what I was afraid of, I wonder what kind of hoops I’m going to have to jump threw to fix this.
Sorry, in '72 H is the engine code 350-2bbl and G is plant code which is Framingham, MA Also had a typo on title when I brought the '68 GS350 from NY to Michigan, you need to contact the DMV and tell them of the problem you just discovered, they may require a law enforcement officer to confirm but they should issue you a corrected title, Good Luck!
Well I guess tomorrow I’m off to the notary to try and get this all sorted out, thank you so much guys you’ve all been extremely helpful!
I bet if you look at the body tag on the cowl, the build date is in the last part of 1971 and that the car was sold new for the first time in 1971 even though it is a 1972 model year. It was very common back in the day for a car to be titled based on the year it was sold new rather than the model year.
Do the cowl tag and title match somewhat at all? or are they completely different? Somebody switched cowl tag, just saying........
Whenever, wherever, you buy any vehicle with a title, match it to the vin# on the vehicle. Mistakes and larceny have been caught many times.
The cowl tag is a Fisher Body tag and really has nothing to do with the VIN. There are some numbers that will correspond, but it is not used to title a car.
I think they were referring to if the VIN tag shows it's a 71 and the cowl tag is a 72,then there may be some swapping done.Other than that,I would contact the DOT and get the title changed to the correct year.They can do that in Pa for sure.
I think you misunderstood what I was saying. The model year ran from August to July. So for the 1972 model year the actual production ran from August 1971 to July 1972. The body tag would certainly indicate a 1972 model year car in the style number field, but I'm guessing the build date is around 10B, which is second week (B) of October (10) 1971. This would mean that there was plenty of time for the car to be sold new in 1971 even though it was a 1972 model year. It was common practice in the 1950's and earlier to title the car based on the year it was sold new and not the model year, so an early production car could have a title with a year that was different than the model year. Although not common in later years, I have seen this on one early 1976 Buick titled as a 1975 even though the VIN and body tag both indicated 1976, it did have a 1975 build date though. I've attached a couple of pictures of trim tags for 1972 model year cars built in October of 1971 so you can see what I'm talking about.
Having had some (unpleasant) experience in the area of title problems, I would recommend that if the VIN on the title is correct, don't go looking for trouble; just leave it as it is. The title for my Model T says "automatic transmission" the VIN is correct and nobody cares about the rest of the information on the title.
I had the same problem when I bought a car out of state 2 digits where wrong had to a law enforcement officer to get the information back to the correct people it needed to be at .