Alternator Interchange

oilhammer said:

But if anyone is curious, the 11th digit of the VIN is the final assembly plant. Emden and Mosel both assembled B5 Passats.

Now, for the record, they use P for a plant in Brazil as well, but the first digit of the VIN would rule that out, as that is the country code. W is the 11th digit slot for the Wolfsburg plant.

So for all you kids paying attention, let's take a 2005 Passat TDI VIN and break it down, shall we?

WVWAE63B35P006010

WVW = German built Volkswagen cars

AE6 = US spec cars use these digits for equipment codes (a lot of non-US spec cars will just have 'ZZZ' here)... in the case of the late B5s, I know the middle digit here denotes the engine. D = AWM 1.8t, E = BHW 2.0L TDI, H = ATQ 2.8L V6, and K = BDP 4.0L W8.

3B = the vehicle platform code, sometimes called a Typ code, in this case "Passat 5" Many part number prefixes for this car will start with '3B'.

3 = fill digit, not sure what this signifies, if anything particular to a model

5 = model year designation, note that these will cycle through letters and numbers, starting in 1980 with 'A', then in 2001 we started with numbers '1', which continued through 2009 with '9', and now we are back to letters, and will continue so until 2030.

P = final assembly plant, in this case Mosel as noted above.

006010 = final serial number sequence, numeric, if there are zeros in the first few bits it is an early production run. I have had a few 1998 New Beetles through the shop over the years with "0000xx" in their VINs!

So there ya have it. With the VIN, you can, without any question, determine exactly when and where the car was assembled, and what car it is.

I think the whole "Wolfsburg Edition" confusion comes from the fact that certain people think it is some sort of badge of honor to have a German assembled Volkswagen instead of the now quite common Mexican assembled ones, and they mistakingly assume ALL Volkswagens built in Germany are built in Wolfsburg. That is not the case, no more than every GM product built in the USA comes from Detroit.

VAG is a HUGE company, with final assembly plants all over the world, and a whopping NINE plants in Germany alone. The Wolfsburg plant, even as big as it has become, couldn't possibly fill the need for all those cars. While it HAS built a wide variety of cars over the years, it generally is only doing final assembly on a handful of models at any given time. Its biggest volume, by far, and one of the planet's top selling models in history, is the Golf. The Golf's success was so staggering and so huge that other models, like the Passat (B1), got booted out to other facilities way back in the 1970s. Fact is, the Emden plant has been assembling Passats essentially from the beginning. Mosel came on line to help meet demand, and is actually a place that has a LONG history of car building, that Volkswagen inherited from Auto Union, and dates back to the days of Horch.

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