---
title: "Ram VIN Lookup: 42 Codes Under the Name, None of Them Ram"
description: "Search the federal register for Ram and 42 manufacturer codes come back, all trailer and motorcycle builders. A Ram VIN opens with one of FCA's 95 instead."
url: "https://baronauto1.com/vehicle-history/ram-vin-decoder/"
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."
---

# Ram VIN Lookup: 42 Codes Under the Name, None of Them Ram

> Search the federal register for Ram and 42 manufacturer codes come back, all trailer and motorcycle builders. A Ram VIN opens with one of FCA's 95 instead.

*VIN & Vehicle History · 22 min read · 4,915 words*

## The short version

- A Ram VIN lookup is the ordinary federal lookup. One register reads every seventeen-character number sold in this market, and a Ram pickup goes through it exactly like anything else.
- Ask that register for manufacturer codes under the name and 42 rows come back. Not one of them belongs to the company that builds the truck. Every one is a different business whose registered name happens to contain the letters R, A and M in a row.
- 8 of those rows carry ordinary three-character codes: 51R, 5UE, 1KB, 40B, 16R, 1RL, 7GU and 73V. They are held by BRAMMO, ENDURAMAX, HOLIDAY RAMBLE, an outfit called AUTORAMA, PYRAMID MANUFACTURING, RAM-LIN CUSTOM TRAILERS, BUILT BY KRAMER and DURAMEX TRAILERS. 7 are filed as trailers and 1 as a motorcycle.
- The other 34 rows are six-character codes belonging to small builders — 23 trailer shops and 11 motorcycle frame makers.
- 34 is the highest false-match count of any of the 57 makes read for this site, more than the next two combined. Of the 81 such rows across the whole set, this one name produces 34.
- The codes a Ram VIN actually opens with sit on the parent entry, filed to the FCA group: 95 three-character identifiers under 3 company names, of which 18 are registered for trucks.
- The decoder still holds the marque by name — 112 models across all the years it covers — so the vehicle decodes normally even though the badge owns no code.
- What no decode carries on a truck: whether it was used to tow, what a second-stage builder did to it, whether the emissions equipment is intact, and what the odometer did between titlings.

Most of the brand pages on this site begin by explaining that a badge holds fewer manufacturer codes than people expect. This one has to begin somewhere stranger. Ask the federal register what it holds under this name and it does not come back empty, and it does not come back with the truck maker. It comes back with 42 rows belonging to 42 businesses that have nothing to do with pickups.

The reason is three letters long. The register’s manufacturer endpoint matches company names as plain text, and R-A-M is a run of letters that sits inside a great many perfectly ordinary company names. Brammo. Enduramax. Pyramid. Duramex. Kramer. Autorama. None of those is a truck brand, and every one of them is a match.

That makes this the noisiest entry in the whole read behind these pages, and it makes it the one entry where our usual method for separating real registrations from name collisions does not work. The method is a length rule, it is right on every other make, and it is wrong here. Rather than quietly print the number it produces, this page prints the rows and shows the failure, because a page about a lookup ought to be honest about the lookup it ran.

**Figure: The 95 codes a Ram VIN actually opens with, by vehicle class**

A bar per vehicle class showing how the 95 three-character manufacturer identifiers on the parent entry a Ram decodes to are filed. The five figures total the whole entry.

Not one of these is filed under the badge. The codes a Ram VIN begins with sit on the parent entry, under FCA CANADA INC., FCA ITALY S.P.A. and FCA US LLC, and 18 of the 95 are registered for trucks. Incomplete Vehicle is the bar a truck buyer should stop on: 22 codes for chassis that leave the original manufacturer needing further work, where the decode describes what that manufacturer certified and holds nothing at all about the second stage. Ask the register for the badge instead and 42 rows come back, none of them the company that builds the pickup — 8 ordinary three-character codes held by a motorcycle maker and 7 trailer builders, and 34 six-character codes belonging to small trailer and motorcycle shops. Those are separate counts of separate things, and a total that mixes them with the 95 describes nothing. Read from NHTSA’s vPIC register.

## There is no Ram-only decoder, and no need for one

The vehicle identification number is a federal standard and its layout does not change with the badge on the tailgate. Positions one to three are the world manufacturer identifier, assigned to the legal entity that issues the numbers. Positions four to eight are a descriptor block each manufacturer designs for its own use. Position nine is a check digit, computed arithmetically from the other sixteen characters. Position ten carries the model year. Position eleven identifies the assembling plant. The last six are the serial.

Because that structure is identical across everything certified for sale here, a general decoder reads a Ram exactly as it reads a saloon or a delivery van. A site advertising a Ram-specific decoder is running the same federal query with the word Ram in the page title. Our [by-make index](https://baronauto1.com/vehicle-history/vin-decoder-by-make/) collects what the register holds for each manufacturer we have read, and makes the general case that the differences between makes live in the register rather than in the reader.

Where a brand-specific decoder would genuinely earn its keep is the middle block, and this is where being honest is more useful than printing a table. Positions four to eight belong to the manufacturer’s own scheme, and the federal register does not publish the key to it. The register records who holds a prefix, which vehicle class it is filed under, which country the entity filed in and when the filing was received. It does not record that a particular character in position five means one cab configuration and another means a different one. So this page prints no position-by-position breakdown and no plant-code list, because we hold neither from a source we would defend. Decoding a real number returns those fields as the federal system resolves them for that specific vehicle, which is a better thing than a printed key assembled from nowhere in particular.

## The 8 three-character codes, and who actually holds them

Here is the whole of the short list, printed in full, because the names are the argument.

51R is held by BRAMMO, INC., filed as a Motorcycle in the United States and registered in July 2015. 5UE is held by ENDURAMAX, LLC, a trailer registration in the United States from the same month. 1KB belongs to HOLIDAY RAMBLE CORPORATION, a trailer registration filed at the end of July 2015. 40B is held by a business the register records as CHARLES H. BURKETT’S AUTORAMA, filed as a trailer in January 2017. 16R belongs to PYRAMID MANUFACTURING COMPANY, a trailer registration from February 2017. 1RL is held by RAM-LIN CUSTOM TRAILERS, filed in March 2017. 7GU is held by BUILT BY KRAMER BBK LLC, filed in May 2017. And 73V belongs to DURAMEX TRAILERS LLC, the newest row on the list, filed in August 2026 with no country recorded against it at all.

Read the vehicle classes rather than the codes and the shape of the list gives itself away immediately. 7 of the 8 are registered for trailers. 1 is registered for a motorcycle. None is registered for a truck. A pickup line does not have a manufacturer entry that looks like this, and no amount of squinting at the codes will turn a trailer registration into one.

Read the names and it is plainer still. Each of the 8 is a separate company, each with a different registered name, and the only thing they share is a run of three letters somewhere inside that name. Brammo has it in the middle. Enduramax has it in the middle. Pyramid has it in the middle. Duramex and Kramer have it in the middle. Autorama has it at the end. Holiday Ramble and Ram-Lin have it at the start of a word that carries on into something else. The register was asked for a string and it returned every registrant containing that string, which is precisely what a text search does and precisely what it was told to do.

One of them deserves a note on its own. 73V, filed to DURAMEX TRAILERS LLC in August 2026, has an empty country field. That is not an error and it is not a redaction. A blank field in the register means nothing was recorded, and any decoder that fills it in for you has stopped reporting and started guessing. It is also a reminder that this register is live: rows are still being added, and a read taken today is a snapshot rather than a permanent list.

## Why the usual filter fails on exactly this name

Every other make page on this site leans on a filter, and it is worth explaining it here because this is the page where it breaks.

The register issues two lengths of manufacturer identifier. The common one is three characters, and it sits at the front of the VIN. The other runs to six characters: the usual first three, where the third is a 9, plus characters twelve to fourteen of the number. That longer form exists because three characters cannot keep thousands of very small builders apart, so for low-volume registrants the identifier reaches further into the number.

On most makes that length difference does the sorting for you. Query the register for Dodge and 3 rows come back, all six characters, all trailer builders, and the length alone tells you they are collisions rather than the brand. Query it for Jeep and a single six-character row comes back, filed by a dealership whose registered name happens to contain the word. The rule — six characters means a small specialist that merely shares a string with the badge — holds up.

It does not hold up here, and the reason is straightforward once you see it. Three-character identifiers are not reserved for car makers. A trailer manufacturer building above the low-volume threshold gets an ordinary three-character code like anybody else, and the register is full of them. So when a string as common as this one is put into a name search, it catches trailer builders on both sides of that threshold at once. 34 of the collisions came back with six characters and were filtered out. 8 came back with three and were not.

The honest consequence is that our own derivation counts those 8 as this make’s own registrations. It is the one make in the set where that count is wrong, it is wrong for a reason worth understanding rather than hiding, and the correction is not a different number but a different question. Do not ask how many codes a badge holds. Ask which registrant holds the code in front of you, and read the name it returns.

## 34 more rows, and the noisiest name in the set

The longer collisions are the larger half of the problem. 34 six-character codes come back on this name, split 23 trailer registrations to 11 motorcycle registrations. 30 of them are recorded in the United States, 3 in Mexico, and 1 carries no country.

The motorcycle side of that split is worth a sentence, because it shows the mechanism at work in a way the trailer side does not. Several of those 11 are frame builders, and the word frame does not contain our three letters — but the companies are registered under names like PRO-STREET FRAMEWORKS and FRAMED UP LLC, and those do. A search for a string finds the string. It has no idea what the string means.

Set that against the rest of the register and the scale of it becomes clear. Across all 57 makes read for this site, name searches return 81 collision rows in total. 34 of them — more than two rows in five — come from this single name. The next noisiest is Ford with 18, then Mack with 8. This one name generates more false matches than those two put together.

43 of the 57 makes return no collisions at all, so a clean result is the ordinary outcome and this is the outlier. Nor is short name length the whole explanation. There are 5 three-letter labels in the set. Four of them — BMW, GMC, KTM and Kia — return nothing false whatsoever. The difference is not that this name is short. It is that these particular three letters are a common run inside English words, and company names are made of English words.

If you have ever wondered why brand-level code counts disagree between VIN sites, this is the mechanism. Some publishers report the raw row count. Some filter by length. Almost nobody reads the registrant names. On most badges the three approaches give similar answers; on this one they give answers that are not even in the same range.

## The 95 codes a Ram VIN opens with

None of the above touches the vehicle itself, which decodes without difficulty. The codes it opens with are on the parent entry, and the parent recorded against this make is the FCA group.

That entry holds 95 three-character identifiers, filed under 3 registered company names: FCA CANADA INC., FCA ITALY S.P.A. and FCA US LLC. A decode returns whichever of those holds the prefix, character for character, capitals and punctuation included. It is reporting the legal entity that issued the number. It is not reporting who designed the vehicle, who sold it, who warrants it or whose name is above the dealership door.

This is the point at which a lot of people conclude the lookup has broken. It has not. A manufacturer that builds in more than one country generally establishes a separate legal entity in each, and each entity registers in its own right. The badge stays constant across all of it because a badge is a marketing fact. The registrant does not, because a registrant is a legal fact. A truck that decodes to a company name you have never seen on a tailgate is behaving exactly as the system was designed to behave, and a seller who tells you it means the vehicle is an import or a rebuild is guessing.

Two other badges in this read point at the same parent entry, and a third does not. Our [Dodge page](https://baronauto1.com/vehicle-history/dodge-vin-lookup/) reads the same 95 codes from the other side, which is a useful contrast: there the brand-name search returns 0 real rows and 3 obvious collisions, and here it returns 0 real rows buried under 42. Meanwhile the register holds a separate Chrysler entry with 52 codes filed under its own set of company names, and no parent above it. Same group, three completely different shapes in the register, none of which says anything about how many vehicles were built.

## How those 95 split, by class and by country

The parent entry breaks down five ways by vehicle class. 30 codes are filed as Multipurpose Passenger Vehicle, the class that catches most of what the market calls an SUV. 22 are Incomplete Vehicle. 18 are Truck. 17 are Passenger Car. 8 are Bus. Those five figures total the whole entry, which is a useful check on any number quoted from it: a breakdown that does not add to 95 is not describing the whole thing.

The Incomplete Vehicle count is the one a truck buyer should pause on, because it is the second largest group and it describes a real and common object. An incomplete vehicle is one that leaves the original manufacturer needing further work before it is finished — a chassis cab that goes to a body builder, a cutaway that becomes a service truck, a platform that ends up under a flatbed or a dump body. If the vehicle in front of you was bodied or converted after it left the original line, the decode describes what the original manufacturer certified and holds nothing at all about the second stage. There will be a separate certification label for that work, and no field in the register links the two.

By country the same 95 split 53 in the United States, 35 in Canada, 2 in Japan, 2 in Italy and 1 in Thailand, with 2 more carrying no country at all. Read that field carefully, because it is the most misread field in the register. The country recorded against a code says where the registering entity filed. It is not a statement that a vehicle was assembled there and should never be quoted as one.

The sample rows we hold make the point concretely. There are codes filed to FCA US LLC — a company name with US in it — where the country field reads JAPAN, and another filed to the same company where it reads THAILAND. Nothing is wrong with those rows. They are the clearest possible demonstration that the entity name and the country field answer two separate questions, and anyone reading either as an assembly address will get a wrong answer on precisely those rows.

One caution about the sample itself. Our archive holds a capped set of rows from that entry rather than all 95, and every row in the cap — 1B3, 1C3, 2B3, 2C3, MN3, JB3, JE3 and the rest — happens to be classed as a Passenger Car. Passenger Car is the fourth largest class in the full entry. Anyone totalling the sample and publishing the result would report a group that builds almost nothing but cars, which the full counts flatly contradict. The sample is here to show what a row looks like. Every count on this page comes from the aggregate fields instead.

## 112 models under a name that owns no code

The register has two halves and they do not agree with each other, which is worth stating because it explains why a lookup can feel broken and a decode can work perfectly on the same afternoon.

One half is the manufacturer-code register described above, keyed to corporate filings, which has never heard of this badge. The other is the decoder’s own model roster, keyed to what manufacturers submit about their lines, and that half holds 112 models under the make name across all the years it covers. There is no requirement that the two halves agree, and on this make they do not come close.

Two cautions belong with that figure. The first is the ordinary one: a model roster is what the decoder knows across every year it holds, not a current line-up and not a used-car catalogue. The second is specific to this page. The register returns 6 vehicle classes against this make name — Truck, Multipurpose Passenger Vehicle, Incomplete Vehicle, Trailer, Motorcycle and Bus — and Motorcycle in that list should be read with the same suspicion as everything else keyed to these three letters. These endpoints match on names. A name this short earns scepticism everywhere it appears, including in the fields that look tidiest.

What is not in doubt is the practical part. Decode an actual seventeen-character number from a Ram and you get make, model, model year, body class, the manufacturer entity, and the equipment fields the manufacturer submitted. The lookup that comes back strange is the one keyed to a word. The one keyed to a number works.

## The truck questions the decode cannot answer

The gap between what people expect a VIN to carry and what it carries is wide on every make, and on a working pickup it is wide in a particular direction. These are the four that matter.

**What it was used for.** Nothing in the number records towing, hauling, plough work, fleet service or a decade of short trips with a loaded bed. Two trucks with the same decode and the same mileage can have had entirely different lives, and only one of them will still have a drivetrain worth buying. The number describes how the vehicle was built, not what was done to it afterwards.

**What its ratings actually mean.** Gross vehicle weight rating is one of the few load-related figures the federal record genuinely returns, and our page on [GVWR by VIN](https://baronauto1.com/vehicle-history/gvwr-by-vin/) sets out how to read it and how it differs from payload. Towing capacity is a different matter: it is a manufacturer figure that depends on axle ratio, cab, bed and equipment, and it is not a field in the register. Treat any site that prints a tow rating straight off a VIN as having inferred it.

**What a second-stage builder did.** On a chassis that was completed by somebody else, the original decode ends where the original certification ended. Beds, bodies, lifts, hitches, fifth-wheel installations and upfit wiring are outside it. Where a trailer is part of the purchase, it carries its own number and its own paperwork, and our [trailer VIN lookup](https://baronauto1.com/vehicle-history/trailer-vin-lookup/) covers why trailer titles cause more trouble than the decoding ever does.

**Whether the emissions equipment is intact.** On a diesel this is close to the whole purchase, and no decode of any number will tell you. The record describes what the manufacturer certified. Whether the certified equipment is still on the vehicle, still connected and still working is a question for an inspection and a scan tool, and a truck that has had that equipment removed is a different object from the one the VIN describes.

## Reading the number off the truck

Whatever the advert says, the number to work from is the one on the vehicle, read with your own eyes and read from more than one place.

The usual locations are the plate visible through the base of the windscreen on the driver’s side and the certification label in the driver’s door aperture. That label is a federal requirement rather than a manufacturer courtesy, which is why it makes a dependable second reading, and on a truck it carries the weight ratings as well. On a chassis finished by a second-stage manufacturer, expect more than one label and read all of them.

Run the check digit before anything else. Position nine is computed arithmetically from the other sixteen characters, so a mistyped number usually fails on the arithmetic before it has cost anybody a two-hour drive. It is worth doing on any number that arrived by text message or was read off a photograph of a screen.

Two readings that disagree with each other is a finding, not a transcription problem to shrug off. So is a label that looks newer than the aperture around it, or fixings that have obviously been disturbed. On a vehicle class where cabs, beds and front clips are routinely swapped, that check is worth more than it is on a saloon.

## The record is the part worth paying for

The decode is the cheap part and the fast part. The record is where used-truck money is won and lost, and the record is retrieved rather than decoded — it lives in title files, insurer reports and recall databases, keyed to the number rather than encoded inside it.

Two of those retrievals are free and should happen before you travel. The federal recall lookup is per-vehicle and authoritative on open campaigns, and an open campaign is a repair the manufacturer will usually pay for. The theft check is free and answers a question that ends a purchase outright.

The title history is the one that repays paying for: the brands, the state-by-state chain, and the odometer readings that entered the record at each titling. On a truck the odometer chain deserves particular attention, because high-mileage examples are normal, the market prices them accordingly, and that combination is exactly what makes a rolled-back reading profitable to a dishonest seller. If you are at the point of putting money down, [pull the title, recall and odometer history against the number](https://carcheckervin.com/?utm_source=baronauto&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=ram-vin-decoder) and read the chain rather than the headline.

A short chain with long ownerships reads well. A truck that has crossed several states quickly is asking a question the seller should be able to answer without hesitating. And where a vehicle carries a brand on its title, the brand is the purchase rather than a detail of it.

## A working order

Get the full seventeen characters off the vehicle rather than from the listing, from the windscreen and from the door aperture, and validate the check digit. A number that fails is a transcription error until proved otherwise, and finding that out first costs nothing.

Decode it. Confirm the model, the model year and the body class against the advert, and expect the manufacturer field to name a corporate entity rather than the badge. A disagreement on model or year ends the conversation early and saves the journey.

Run the free federal checks while the number is in front of you. Recalls and the theft flag are per-vehicle, free and quick, and either can settle the matter from the kitchen table.

Buy the title history once, and read the odometer chain and the state sequence rather than the summary line.

Then do the part no record covers. Look underneath at the frame, the hitch mounting and the rear suspension, because those are where a towing life shows first. On a diesel, confirm the emissions equipment is present and unmodified. And book a pre-purchase inspection with somebody who works on trucks, because the condition of a specific vehicle is the one thing this entire page has been telling you the number cannot carry.

## Common questions

### Is there a Ram VIN decoder?

Not as a separate system. Ram vehicles carry the same seventeen-character number as everything else certified for sale here, and the same federal register resolves the manufacturer prefix on all of them. A Ram-branded decoder page is running the general query with the brand in the title.

### How many manufacturer codes does the register hold under the name Ram?

A name query returns 42 rows, and none of them belongs to the company that builds the pickup. 8 carry ordinary three-character codes and are held by a motorcycle maker and 7 trailer builders. The other 34 are six-character codes held by small trailer and motorcycle shops. The codes on an actual Ram sit on the parent entry instead.

### Why does a search for Ram return trailers?

Because the register matches registrant company names as plain text rather than resolving brands, and those three letters sit inside a great many company names — Brammo, Enduramax, Pyramid, Duramex, Autorama, Holiday Ramble. Every one of those is a match, and none of them builds pickups.

### Which codes does a Ram VIN actually begin with?

One of the 95 three-character identifiers on the parent entry, filed under FCA CANADA INC., FCA ITALY S.P.A. or FCA US LLC. 18 of those 95 are registered for trucks. A decode returns the registrant name as filed, which is why the manufacturer line names a company rather than the badge.

### Why is a company I have never heard of named as the manufacturer of my truck?

Because the field reports the legal entity that issued the number. Manufacturer identifiers are held by corporate entities, not by badges, and a group with plants in several countries generally registers a separate entity in each. It is the correct output, not a warning sign.

### Does an odd manufacturer count mean the make is poorly covered?

No. The decoder holds 112 models under the make name across the years it covers, and a Ram VIN decodes normally — make, model, model year, body class and the equipment fields the manufacturer submitted. The strange count measures a text search on a brand name, not coverage of the brand.

### Why do different VIN sites give different code counts for this brand?

Because they filter the same messy result in different ways. The raw row count is 42. Filtering by identifier length leaves 8. Reading the registrant names leaves none. On most badges those three methods roughly agree; on this one they do not, which is why a count quoted without a method behind it is worth nothing.

### Can a VIN tell me the towing capacity of a used Ram?

Not from the federal record. Gross vehicle weight rating is published and does come back from a decode, but towing capacity depends on axle ratio, cab, bed and fitted equipment, and it is a manufacturer figure rather than a register field. A site printing a tow rating from a VIN alone has inferred it.

### Will the decode show a lift kit, a swapped engine or a new bed?

No. The record describes the vehicle as the original manufacturer certified it and nothing revises it afterwards. On a vehicle class with this much modification and upfit activity, that limitation bites harder than it does elsewhere, and it is the single best argument for an inspection.

### What does Incomplete Vehicle mean if it comes back in a decode?

It is the federal class for a vehicle that leaves the original manufacturer needing further work before it is finished, and it accounts for 22 of the parent entry’s 95 codes. If the truck was bodied or converted afterwards, the decode covers the original certification only, and the second-stage work has its own separate label.

### Why does one of the codes have no country recorded?

Because the register simply has nothing in that field. 73V, filed in August 2026, is one such row, and 2 codes on the parent entry are the same. A blank means nothing was recorded rather than that something was hidden, and a decoder that fills it in for you is guessing.

### Does a date against a code tell me when a truck was built?

No. Where the register carries a date, it records when the code was registered. It is not a build date, a sale date or a model year. The model year sits at position ten of the individual number.

## Sources and further reading

- [NHTSA VIN decoder](https://vpic.nhtsa.dot.gov/decoder/)
- [NHTSA recall lookup](https://www.nhtsa.gov/recalls)
- [NHTSA odometer fraud](https://www.nhtsa.gov/equipment/odometer-fraud)
- [NMVTIS (US Department of Justice)](https://vehiclehistory.bja.ojp.gov/)
- [49 CFR Part 567 — Certification](https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-49/subtitle-B/chapter-V/part-567)

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/ram-vin-decoder/