---
title: "Fuel Type by VIN: What the Federal Decoder Returns, Field by Field"
description: "NHTSA's decoder publishes two fuel fields with fourteen permitted values. Across twenty-five decoded VINs only six appeared, and the battery fields mostly came back blank."
url: "https://baronauto1.com/vehicle-history/fuel-type-by-vin/"
type: "article"
published: "2026-09-06"
modified: "2026-09-06"
site: "Baron Auto"
disclaimer: "This site is under new ownership and is not affiliated with Baron Auto Emporium dealership."
---

# Fuel Type by VIN: What the Federal Decoder Returns, Field by Field

> NHTSA's decoder publishes two fuel fields with fourteen permitted values. Across twenty-five decoded VINs only six appeared, and the battery fields mostly came back blank.

*VIN & Vehicle History · 22 min read · 5,003 words*

## The short version

- Yes, a VIN gives you the fuel type, and it is free. The federal vPIC decoder publishes two fields for it — “Fuel Type - Primary” and “Fuel Type - Secondary” — and the primary field came back filled on twenty-three of the twenty-five VINs decoded for this page.
- The primary field is a lookup with fourteen permitted values. Only six of them appeared across the whole sample: Gasoline, Diesel, Electric, Compressed Natural Gas (CNG), Flexible Fuel Vehicle (FFV) and Fuel Cell.
- The order of the two fields is the hybrid tell. A conventional full hybrid files Gasoline first and Electric second. A plug-in hybrid and a battery-electric car both file Electric first — the plug-in adds Gasoline as the secondary, the battery car leaves it blank.
- Flex fuel is filed two incompatible ways. Some vehicles return “Flexible Fuel Vehicle (FFV)” as the primary with nothing secondary; others return Gasoline primary and “Ethanol (E85)” secondary. Same capability, different filing.
- Two of the twenty-five returned no fuel type at all despite a correct check digit, because the manufacturer did not submit enough of the descriptor characters. An empty field is a missing submission, not a vehicle with no engine.
- The battery and charger fields exist — twelve battery variables and two charger variables — and mostly come back blank. Across thirteen electrified vehicles, six returned a battery chemistry, five returned pack energy, one returned a charger level and none returned charger power.
- The two motorcycle fuel-tank fields, tank type and tank material, came back empty on every decode run for this page — motorcycles included, which is where those fields are supposed to earn their keep.
- What no decode carries: what is in the tank today, whether the vehicle has been converted, and what it actually returns per gallon.

Fuel type is one of the few things a used-car shopper wants from a VIN that the federal decoder genuinely, reliably answers. It is not buried, it is not inferred, and it does not cost anything. There is a named field, it has a defined list of permitted values, and on most vehicles it arrives filled.

That is the good news, and it is worth saying plainly before the qualifications start. What follows is the qualifications, because the interesting part of this field is not that it exists — it is the shape of what comes back when you actually run numbers through it, which is messier and more revealing than the one-line answer suggests.

Everything below comes from decoding twenty-five real seventeen-character numbers through NHTSA’s public vPIC service and reading what each one returned, field by field, including the fields that came back empty. The empty ones are the point. A decoder that publishes a variable is not the same thing as a decoder that returns a value for it, and the gap between those two statements is where most of the confusion about VIN fuel lookups lives.

## The field has a name, and it sits in the busiest part of the decoder

vPIC publishes 144 variables in total. Twenty of them describe the engine, which makes the engine group the largest in the system — our page on [engine size by VIN](https://baronauto1.com/vehicle-history/engine-size-by-vin/) works through that group in detail and explains why displacement is the single best-covered thing a decode does.

Fuel lives inside that group. Two of the twenty engine variables are named for it directly: “Fuel Type - Primary” and “Fuel Type - Secondary”. A third, “Fuel Delivery/Fuel Injection Type”, describes how the fuel gets into the cylinder rather than what the fuel is. A fourth, “Electrification Level”, is the field that separates a mild hybrid from a plug-in from a battery car, and it does more work on modern vehicles than either fuel field does.

Both fuel fields are lookups rather than free text. That matters more than it sounds. A lookup field can only ever return one of a fixed set of published values, so a decode cannot come back saying “petrol/LPG dual fuel” or “diesel hybrid” or anything else a manufacturer might have wanted to write. It returns one of the permitted strings or it returns nothing. Everything a used buyer reads out of this field is shaped by that constraint.

The values are not written into the seventeen characters in any position you could point at. There is no fuel character. Positions four to eight are the manufacturer’s own descriptor scheme and each maker decides privately what to encode there; vPIC resolves fuel type by matching that descriptor block against the pattern tables the manufacturer submitted, not by reading a fixed slot. Anyone offering you a chart that says “the sixth character is the engine and fuel” is describing one manufacturer’s scheme in one era, not a rule.

**Figure: Reading the primary and secondary fuel fields in order**

A two-column figure mapping each combination of the primary and secondary fuel fields returned by NHTSA’s decoder to the kind of powertrain it describes, including the case where the same capability is filed two ways and the case where both fields come back empty.

The order of the two fields is the hybrid tell, and almost nobody states it. A plug-in and a conventional hybrid are advertised with the same word and file the opposite way round, which is the difference between a car that can do a commute on electricity and one that cannot. Everything here comes from decoding twenty-five real seventeen-character numbers through vPIC and reading every field that came back, including the empty ones.

## Fourteen values are permitted. Six of them turned up.

The published list of permitted values for the primary fuel field runs to fourteen entries: Diesel, Electric, Gasoline, Compressed Natural Gas (CNG), Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG), Compressed Hydrogen/Hydrogen, Liquefied Petroleum Gas (propane or LPG), Ethanol (E85), Neat Ethanol (E100), Methanol (M85), Neat Methanol (M100), Flexible Fuel Vehicle (FFV), Natural Gas and Fuel Cell. The secondary field draws on exactly the same fourteen.

Across the twenty-five decodes, six of those fourteen appeared as a primary value. Gasoline and Diesel between them accounted for most of the sample, which is what you would expect. Electric appeared on every battery car and, less obviously, on every plug-in hybrid. Compressed Natural Gas (CNG) came back on a 2013 Honda Civic. Flexible Fuel Vehicle (FFV) came back on two vehicles. Fuel Cell came back on both Toyota Mirai numbers.

Eight permitted values did not appear at all: LNG, hydrogen as a primary, propane or LPG, E85 as a primary, E100, M85, M100 and the bare “Natural Gas” entry that sits alongside the compressed one. That absence is worth stating carefully, because it is easy to over-read. It does not mean no vehicle on American roads decodes as propane. It means that a hunt aimed squarely at unusual fuels — school buses, refuse chassis, stripped commercial chassis, heavy tractor units, inside the counted sample and alongside it — did not surface a single one. Every gaseous-fuel candidate tried came back Diesel or Gasoline instead.

The practical reading for a buyer is this: if you are shopping for something that runs on propane or natural gas, do not expect the decode to be your confirmation. Expect it to be silent or to describe the base engine, and go and look at the tank, the filler and the certification label instead.

Two more values did appear, but only in the secondary slot rather than the primary: “Ethanol (E85)” and “Compressed Hydrogen/Hydrogen”. That takes the count of distinct fuel strings observed anywhere in the sample to eight of the fourteen, split across the two fields in a way that is not obvious until you look at both together.

## Hybrids: the field order flips, and that flip is the tell

This is the most useful thing on the page, and almost nobody states it.

A conventional full hybrid — the kind that has no plug and charges its battery from the engine and from braking — files gasoline first. A 2010 Toyota Prius decoded as Gasoline primary, Electric secondary, with the electrification level given as “Strong HEV (Hybrid Electric Vehicle)”.

A plug-in hybrid reverses it. A 2012 Chevrolet Volt, a 2018 Honda Clarity, a 2021 BMW 330e and a 2024 Toyota RAV4 Prime all decoded as Electric primary, Gasoline secondary, with the electrification level given as “PHEV (Plug-in Hybrid Electric Vehicle)”. Four vehicles from four manufacturers across twelve model years, filed identically.

A battery-electric car files Electric primary and leaves the secondary field empty. A 2013 Nissan Leaf, a 2018 Tesla Model 3, a 2022 Rivian R1T, a 2023 Chevrolet Bolt EUV, a 2023 Ford F-150 and a 2023 Hyundai Ioniq 5 all did exactly that, every one of them carrying “BEV (Battery Electric Vehicle)” as the electrification level.

So the reading rule, on the evidence of this sample, is compact. Electric primary with a gasoline secondary means it plugs in and also burns fuel. Electric primary with nothing secondary means it only plugs in. Gasoline primary with an electric secondary means it never plugs in, whatever the seller’s listing says about “hybrid”. That last case is the one that matters commercially, because the plug is the difference between a car that can do a commute on electricity and one that cannot, and the two are advertised with the same word.

The electrification level field is the belt to that braces. It has six permitted values: mild hybrid, strong hybrid, plug-in hybrid, battery electric, fuel-cell electric, and a catch-all for a hybrid whose level was not stated. Four of the six appeared in the sample. Neither “Mild HEV” nor the unknown-level catch-all turned up, which is a real gap given how many belt-driven starter-generator systems have shipped in the last decade — a mild hybrid in this sample simply decoded as a plain gasoline vehicle, with the electrification field left blank.

That is a limitation worth carrying into a purchase. If a car has a small electrified system that assists the engine but never drives the wheels alone, the decode may well not mention it at all, and you will be back to reading the badge and the engine bay.

## Flex fuel is filed two incompatible ways

Ethanol capability produced the strangest result in the sample, and it is the clearest example of why a lookup field with fourteen options does not guarantee consistency.

A 2011 Chevrolet Silverado returned “Flexible Fuel Vehicle (FFV)” as its primary fuel type and left the secondary blank. A 2012 Dodge Grand Caravan did exactly the same. Both are filed as though FFV were itself a fuel, which it is not — it is a description of what the fuel system tolerates.

A 2016 Chevrolet Impala, from the same manufacturer as the Silverado, went the other way: Gasoline primary, “Ethanol (E85)” secondary. The engine model string on that decode even spells out the tolerance range in the manufacturer’s own shorthand, running from no ethanol to pure ethanol.

Two filings, one physical capability. If you are searching a listings feed or a fleet database by fuel type, this is the trap: filtering for “Flexible Fuel Vehicle (FFV)” will silently drop every vehicle filed the other way, and filtering for gasoline will silently include a lot of flex-fuel trucks. There is no way to tell from the outside which convention a given manufacturer used in a given year, so the only safe approach is to accept both patterns as the same answer.

There is a second trap underneath it. A flex-fuel badge on the boot lid and a yellow filler cap are physical evidence; the decode is a filing. Where a vehicle was offered in both flex and non-flex form with the same engine, and the descriptor block does not separate them, the decode will tell you what the pattern says rather than what the individual truck is. Check the cap and the label.

## Hydrogen, and the same model filed two different ways

Both Toyota Mirai numbers in the sample decoded as Fuel Cell primary, with “FCEV (Fuel Cell Electric Vehicle)” as the electrification level. So far, so consistent.

The difference is the secondary field. The 2016 car left it empty. The 2021 car filled it with “Compressed Hydrogen/Hydrogen”. Same model line, same manufacturer, same fuel, two different filings five model years apart.

Neither is wrong exactly — a fuel-cell car does run on compressed hydrogen, and “Fuel Cell” does describe the conversion device — but a database consumer who assumed the secondary field would be stable across a model line would get two different answers for the same car. The lesson generalises well beyond hydrogen: these fields are as consistent as each manufacturer’s submission process, and submission processes change.

## When the field comes back empty

Two of the twenty-five decodes returned no fuel type at all. A 2019 Hyundai Tucson and a 2019 GMC Savana both came back with the check digit confirmed correct and a second error code attached, the one vPIC uses when it cannot provide information for some of the characters in the number based on the manufacturer’s submission. Make, model year and vehicle type arrived; fuel type, displacement, cylinder count and engine model all arrived empty.

This is the single most misread result in VIN decoding, so it is worth being explicit. An empty field does not mean the vehicle has no such property. It means nobody filed a value that the decoder can resolve for that particular descriptor pattern. NHTSA says as much in the note it attaches to every response: a missing value should not be read as an indication that a feature is unavailable on the vehicle.

Motorcycles produced the same effect more often than cars. The two in the counted sample — a 2007 Harley-Davidson Street Glide and a 2022 Honda Fireblade — both decoded cleanly to Gasoline, and the Harley additionally returned its engine stroke cycles, one of only three vehicles in the sample to fill that field. But two further motorcycle numbers tried while the sample was being assembled returned no fuel type at all, one of them flagging errors in some positions on top of the partial-submission note. Two-wheeled coverage in this register is thinner than four-wheeled coverage, and a blank on a motorcycle should surprise you rather less than a blank on a pickup.

The practical rule: treat a blank as an unanswered question, go and answer it another way, and never let a listing use a blank decode as evidence of anything.

## The battery and charger fields are defined, and mostly blank

This is where the gap between “published” and “populated” is widest, and where anybody shopping for a used electric car needs to lower their expectations before they start.

vPIC defines twelve battery variables and two charger variables. The battery set covers chemistry, pack energy in kilowatt-hours, voltage, current, cells per module, modules per pack, packs per vehicle, the drive-unit description and a free-text field, most of them offered as a from-and-to pair so a manufacturer can file a range. The charger set is just two: charger level and charger power in kilowatts. Chemistry itself is a lookup with nine permitted values, and charger level is a lookup with three.

Thirteen of the twenty-five vehicles came back with an electrification level, which is the decoder’s own statement that it considers them electrified. Against that group of thirteen, here is what the battery and charger fields actually returned.

Six returned a battery chemistry. Four of those were “Lithium-Ion/Li-Ion” and two were “Nickel-Metal-Hydride/NiMH”, both of the latter being the fuel-cell cars, whose buffer battery is the pack being described.

Five returned pack energy. A 2023 Ford F-150 returned 98.00 kWh, a 2022 Rivian R1T returned 128.90 kWh, a 2023 Chevrolet Bolt EUV returned 65 kWh, and both Mirai numbers returned 1.6 kWh — which is a completely sensible figure for a fuel-cell buffer pack and a completely nonsensical one if you misread the field as the vehicle’s usable range store. The upper half of the from-and-to pair was empty on every vehicle in the sample.

One returned a charger level: the Rivian, filed at the fast-charging level, described in the published lookup as a DC charger of up to 400A and up to 600V DC. None of the twenty-five returned a charger power figure in kilowatts.

Two returned a pack voltage. A 2023 Hyundai Ioniq 5 returned 697 volts — and returned nothing else at all from the battery group, no chemistry and no pack energy, which is a striking single data point to file on its own. The 2016 Mirai returned 244 in its voltage field.

And here is the detail that should end any argument about treating these fields as authoritative: the 2021 Mirai returned 244 in the current field, in amps, having returned nothing in the voltage field. Same model line, same number, filed into a different variable. One of those two filings is a slip, and there is no way to tell from the outside which.

Nothing in the sample returned modules per pack, packs per vehicle, or the free-text battery note. Three returned a drive-unit description: the Tesla a single motor, the Ford a dual motor and the Rivian a quad motor. That is arguably the most useful battery-group field of the lot and is also the one most often blank.

Put together: seven of the fourteen battery and charger variables were populated at least once somewhere in the sample, and seven were never populated at all. If you are trying to establish what a used electric car’s pack is, the decode is a partial and inconsistent starting point, not an answer. The pack’s remaining capacity — the number that actually decides the purchase — is not in the register in any form and never will be, because it is a measurement of a specific car today rather than a fact about how it was built.

## The fuel-tank fields that were empty every single time

There are two more fuel-related variables that are easy to miss because they are not filed under the engine group at all. “Fuel-Tank Type” and “Fuel-Tank Material” sit in the motorcycle section of the variable list, alongside chassis type and suspension type.

Both are lookups with real content behind them. Tank type has four permitted values covering saddle, under-seat, submerged-in-frame and perimeter-mount arrangements. Tank material has six, running from steel and aluminium alloy through composites to injection-moulded plastic and plastic covered by metal.

Neither field returned a value on any of the twenty-five decodes. Not on the passenger cars, where you would not expect it. Not on the trucks or the multipurpose vehicles. And not on the motorcycles, which is the one place the fields exist to serve.

That is an absence rather than a zero, and it is reported here as one. The variables are defined, the permitted values are published, and in this sample nothing filed against them. If you need to know what a tank is made of — for a corrosion question, an insurance question, or a modification question — the decode is not where that lives.

## What the fuel field is actually good for

Having spent several sections on the limits, it is worth saying what the field genuinely earns.

**It settles the diesel question independently of the seller.** That single word changes the cost of ownership, the service schedule, the emissions regime and the resale market, and it is occasionally fudged in listings for older trucks and vans. Our comparison of [diesel and gasoline trucks](https://baronauto1.com/truck-buying-tips/diesel-vs-gas-trucks-pros-cons/) works through what actually follows from the answer, and it is a bigger fork than most first-time truck buyers expect.

**It tells you which emissions programme you are walking into.** Test procedures, exemptions and inspection intervals are all keyed to powertrain type, and the decode is the cheapest way to establish which one applies before you own the vehicle. Our page on [emissions checks by VIN](https://baronauto1.com/vehicle-history/emissions-check-by-vin/) covers what the decode contributes and where the state programme takes over.

**It catches the plug-in-versus-hybrid confusion.** Reading the primary and secondary fields in order settles in seconds a question that costs real money if you get it wrong, and it does so from a federal filing rather than from an advert.

**It gives an insurer or a registration clerk the answer they are asking for.** Both frequently want fuel type on a form, and taking it from the certification record rather than from memory avoids a correction later.

The fuel field also sits alongside the rest of the specification block, and it is usually worth pulling the whole thing at once rather than one field at a time — our overview of [vehicle specs by VIN](https://baronauto1.com/vehicle-history/vehicle-specs-by-vin/) covers what else arrives in the same response.

## What no decode will tell you

Three things people expect from this lookup and will not get.

**What is in the tank right now.** Obvious when written down, less obvious in practice. A flex-fuel truck decoded as FFV might be running on straight gasoline and always have been. A dual-fuel conversion might be sitting on a gaseous system that the decode has never heard of. The field describes what the vehicle was certified to accept, not what the last owner put in it.

**Fuel economy.** The register carries nothing about consumption, range or emissions output per mile. Those are EPA territory rather than NHTSA territory, they are measured on a test cycle rather than filed against a number, and they are published per model and configuration rather than per vehicle. A decode that returns Gasoline tells you precisely nothing about what the car will cost to run.

**Whether the vehicle has been converted.** This is the important one and it gets its own section.

## Conversions, and why the record does not move

The fuel type in the register is the fuel type the vehicle was certified with when it was built. The record is written once and is not revised.

So a gasoline van fitted with a propane system after the fact still decodes as gasoline. A diesel pickup running on a vegetable-oil conversion still decodes as diesel. A car converted to electric drive in somebody’s workshop still decodes as whatever engine left the factory in it. In every one of those cases the decode is accurate about history and wrong about the vehicle in front of you.

None of that is improper in itself. Aftermarket fuel conversions are a real and regulated industry, and a properly certified conversion comes with its own paperwork. But the consequences run in three separate directions and it is worth keeping them apart. The emissions position depends on whether the conversion system was certified for that engine family, and modifying a certified emissions system outside those rules is prohibited under federal law. The insurance position depends on disclosure. And the registration position depends on the state, some of which want the fuel type on the record amended and some of which do not care.

A converted vehicle is therefore not a decode question at all. It is a documents question, and the document you want is the conversion certification, not the VIN report.

## Running the decode yourself

The decoder that produced everything on this page is public, free and operated by NHTSA. There is a web form, and there is an API behind it that takes a seventeen-character number and returns the whole variable set including the empty fields.

Start by reading the number off the vehicle rather than off the advert, and read it from two places. On a car that means the plate visible through the base of the windscreen on the driver’s side and the certification label in the driver’s door aperture — the label is a federal requirement, which is what makes it a dependable second reading. Two readings that disagree is a finding, not a typo.

Then check the ninth character before you trust anything. Position nine is a check digit computed from the other sixteen, and a number that fails it arithmetically has been mistyped or invented. Every one of the twenty-five numbers used for this page was confirmed against that arithmetic before it was submitted, which is why a partial result in this sample always means a thin manufacturer submission rather than a bad number.

When the response comes back, read the fields in this order: primary fuel, secondary fuel, electrification level, then displacement and cylinder count. The first three together classify the powertrain. The last two tell you whether an engine is present at all — on the battery cars in this sample both were empty, as they should be, while every plug-in hybrid returned a displacement and a cylinder count because a plug-in hybrid still has an engine in it.

## When the decode and the filler cap disagree

A disagreement between the decode and the vehicle is information, and how much it matters depends on which direction it runs.

Decode says gasoline, vehicle has a diesel filler and a diesel badge: ask hard. Either the descriptor pattern is being resolved loosely because the manufacturer filed a shared pattern across both engines, or something about the vehicle is not what the paperwork says. The first is common and harmless. The second is not.

Decode says flex fuel, vehicle has an ordinary filler cap and no badge: usually the filing convention rather than the vehicle, and usually harmless, but it is a reasonable thing to raise.

Decode says gasoline, vehicle is visibly running on a gaseous system: a conversion, and the documents question above applies.

Decode returns nothing at all: a thin submission, not a defect. Cross-check the certification label under the bonnet or in the door aperture, which carries the emissions family and, on most vehicles built for this market, tells you the fuel unambiguously.

In every one of those cases the physical evidence outranks the filing for what the vehicle is today, and the filing outranks the seller for what the vehicle was built as. Keeping those two questions separate is most of the skill.

## The check that outranks the specification

Fuel type tells you what you are buying. It says nothing whatever about whether buying it is wise, and it is worth being blunt about the order of operations.

Open safety recalls are free to look up per vehicle and free to have fixed, and fuel-system components are a recurring subject of them. Title history — brands, the state-by-state chain, the odometer readings entered at each titling — decides considerably more about a purchase than displacement or fuel ever will. Both run off the same seventeen characters you have already typed.

Run those before you spend a morning driving to look at something. The specification decode is the cheap, fast, satisfying part; the record is where the money is.

## Common questions

### Can you tell fuel type from a VIN?

Yes, in most cases and at no cost. NHTSA’s vPIC decoder publishes a “Fuel Type - Primary” field, and it came back populated on twenty-three of the twenty-five numbers decoded for this page. The two that came back empty had correct check digits; the manufacturer simply had not filed enough detail for those descriptor characters.

### Which character in the VIN is the fuel type?

There isn’t one. Fuel is not assigned a fixed position. It is resolved from the descriptor block at positions four to eight, which each manufacturer designs privately, by matching that block against the pattern tables the manufacturer submitted. Charts claiming a universal fuel character are describing one maker’s scheme, not a standard.

### How do I tell a plug-in hybrid from a regular hybrid using the VIN?

Read the two fuel fields in order. A regular full hybrid files Gasoline primary and Electric secondary. A plug-in files Electric primary and Gasoline secondary. The electrification level field confirms it in words, returning “Strong HEV” for the first and “PHEV (Plug-in Hybrid Electric Vehicle)” for the second.

### Why does my VIN say “Flexible Fuel Vehicle (FFV)” instead of a fuel?

Because that string is itself one of the fourteen permitted values, and some manufacturers file it as the primary type. Others file the same capability as Gasoline primary with “Ethanol (E85)” secondary. Both mean the vehicle was built to tolerate ethanol blends; there is no difference in the vehicle, only in the filing.

### Does a VIN decode show battery size on an electric car?

Sometimes, and not reliably. Pack energy in kilowatt-hours is a defined field, and it returned a figure on only five of the twenty-five vehicles decoded here. Battery chemistry returned on six. Charger power returned on none. Treat any battery figure from a decode as a bonus rather than as something you can count on finding.

### Can a VIN tell me the battery health of a used electric car?

No. Remaining capacity is a measurement of a specific pack on a specific day, not a fact about how the vehicle was built, so no decoder of any kind returns it. It has to come from an inspection or a diagnostic test on the car in front of you.

### My decode came back with no fuel type at all. Is the VIN wrong?

Probably not. If the check digit validates, the number is almost certainly fine and the gap is in the manufacturer’s submission. NHTSA attaches a note to every response saying a missing value should not be read as meaning the feature is unavailable. Confirm the fuel from the certification label instead.

### Will the VIN show that a vehicle was converted to run on propane or LPG?

No. The record is written at certification and never updated, so an aftermarket conversion is invisible to it — the decode will keep reporting the fuel the vehicle was built with. Ask for the conversion certification paperwork; that is the document that settles it.

### Does the decode tell me fuel economy or range?

No. Consumption, range and emissions per mile are EPA figures, measured on a test cycle and published per model and configuration rather than filed against an individual number. Nothing in the VIN register carries them.

### Is there a charge for looking up fuel type by VIN?

No. The federal decoder is a free public service with a web form and an open API, and it returns the full variable set including the fields that come back empty. Anything charging for that specific lookup is charging you for a free federal response.

## Sources and further reading

- [NHTSA VIN decoder](https://vpic.nhtsa.dot.gov/decoder/)
- [EPA fueleconomy.gov](https://www.fueleconomy.gov/)
- [EPA vehicle and engine tampering policy](https://www.epa.gov/enforcement/epa-tampering-policy-epa-enforcement-policy-vehicle-and-engine-tampering-and)
- [49 CFR Part 567 — Certification](https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-49/subtitle-B/chapter-V/part-567)
- [NHTSA recall lookup](https://www.nhtsa.gov/recalls)

Recall, complaint and safety-rating figures on this page were retrieved from the federal databases above on August 19, 2026. Federal data changes — re-check any VIN before you rely on it.

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*This site is under new ownership and is not affiliated with Baron Auto Emporium dealership.*

Canonical source: https://baronauto1.com/vehicle-history/fuel-type-by-vin/