Deere has the most notable increase in PIN adoption making up slightly more than half of all PINs in the used market. Looking at the graph above, we see that while the manufacturers have different percentages for observed PIN use, all five lines indicate an increasing trend. The PIN standard has been slowly adopted by OEMs in the construction equipment industry and has also been adopted by second hand sellers and equipment end users. The last eight characters are for the Machine Indicator Section (MIS), a distinguisher of one machine from another by designation. The next five characters represent the Machine Descriptor Section (MDS), comprising information describing the machine, followed by one character check letter (CL), an alpha character based on a calculation of the remaining 16 characters in the PIN. The first three characters denote the World Manufacturer Code (WMC), an alphanumeric code designating the manufacturer of the machine. It is similar to the VIN standard from the auto industry and has the same format.
In 2004, the 17-character Product Identification Number (PIN) for earth moving equipment was introduced by ISO.
After the 17-character VIN became mandatory and standardized, it put an end to the chaos for both the auto industry and vehicle owners and made it much easier to access vehicle information such as make, model, year, engine, horsepower, trim, and type as well as history of a vehicle.ĮquipmentWatch offers the most complete model year verification tool in the industry. Previously, there had been no standard in vehicle identification number resulting in each manufacturer using their own formats.
This adoption occurred 27 years after VINs were first used in the United States. In 1981, the Vehicle Identification Number (VIN) was standardized by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) in the United States which required all on-road vehicles to contain a 17-character identification number.