YT 73918

In some cases you can find out where the car came from by doing a search for the vin at the site https://www.vindecoderz.com/

For many cars there's hardly any information, but for some you can find a line like "ownership manual in hungarian" or "for domestic market" etc.

If you suspect a car to come from Denmark - or another of the very few countries where you can search on vin - you can try that as well. If the car was ever registered in that country, you should get a hit.

Finally, you can try to simply do a Google-search on the vin. Some international sellers list the vin in their ads and you may get lucky and find the original (expired) ad the car was sold from. In most cases, the ads will also list the country/location of the seller.

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Thanks for the tips! I will do that in the future!

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You're welcome. I know that many (most?) users mostly care about the plates on the photos, but personally I really enjoy doing "car archeology", uncovering the history of selected cars.

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I actually got results the first time I tried to look a car up! This van here http://platesmania.com/gallery.php?markaavto=72&model=1307&usr=72392 was imported from Denmark in February and previously had the number ''XX12115''. Especially interesting considering there is only one Interstar in the Danish gallery!

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Well done, and congrats on the result! It's so great when a piece of hidden information gets uncovered.

I looked up Nissan Interstar on http://nrpla.de and it's no wonder there's just one in the danish gallery... there are only 136 left registered in Denmark.

The one you link to, ex-XX12115, was based somewhere in southern/central Zealand (Sorø area), but after being retired in september 2016, it was moved to the opposite end of the country, to Hjørring, where it underwent the final mot and export valuation in december before getting exported in january 2017.

So we can assume, that the final danish owner was a dealership in the Hjørring area, and that the car was shipped out to Norway from Hirtshals.

I hope others will see this as well and get into car archeology, it's so fun!

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Heh thanks, Denmark is the country that 3rd most cars are imported from (after Sweden and Germany) so it's not unlikely I will find more. Shame you can't check VIN numbers in Sweden and Germany (or at least I haven't been able to find any sites for that).

That's interesting, do you know how many have been registered in total including scrapped, deregistered and exported ones? In Norway there is roughtly 334 Interstars currently registered, out of 349 in total, which means only 15 have been removed from traffic, temporarily or permanently.
And it's really interesting that everyone is able to see things related to ownership in Denmark. As far as I know you can only get information like that here in Norway if you call the Public Roads Administration. And they may require you to prove that you own the vehicle to see it's past ownership history. Only technical details, a few dates (year produced, date imported, date of transfering ownership and date of inspection) and name and area of it's current owner.

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There seems to have been a total of 526 Nissan Interstar registered in Denmark. 200 listed as "retired" (this includes ones that got wrecked), 189 exported and, as already mentioned, 136 still registered.

It's worth remembering, that in Denmark, the term "retired" can cover anything from a 1-day temporary break while changing owners, to the car actually having been scrapped, exported without reporting (many of the ex-danish cars seen on this site, running on fake danish plates in Ukraine and similar are never reported as exports)

The swedish site https://biluppgifter.se/fordon/ claims that "u kan ange registreringsnummer eller VIN (chassinummer) i din sökning", but if you enter a VIN, it just says that "Angivet registreringsnummer finns inte i fordonsregistret" - in other words, it thinks that the VIN entered is a license plate. I haven't found a way to make it recognize a VIN as a VIN.

For Germany, it's a hopeless cause. They're completely hysterical about "privacy protection" - I know that a searchable database exists there, but there's no public access.

In Denmark, you can't really see much about ownership. You can see the names and locations of MOT sites used, and if there's any debt registered, you can see the name of the debitor. For a short period, it was also possible to see the town and zip-code of the owner, but people complained about that, so this info is no longer available.

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