# VIN questions: RC vs Production cars



## garsh (Apr 4, 2016)

*VIN questions*

I see nothing in the Tesla VIN decoder that distinguishes release candidates from production cars.

Are we sure that the RCs even have a VIN?
If they do, could production car VINs just start where the RC's left off? That is, maybe Musk's vehicle has a VIN ending in something like 000391.


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## Michael Russo (Oct 15, 2016)

garsh said:


> *VIN questions*
> 
> I see nothing in the Tesla VIN decoder that distinguishes release candidates from production cars.
> 
> ...


Hey, Garsh, not sure why you posted this here?


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## garsh (Apr 4, 2016)

Me either. Oops.
I guess I'll move these to a new thread.

Edit: done.


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## MelindaV (Apr 2, 2016)

garsh said:


> *VIN questions*
> 
> I see nothing in the Tesla VIN decoder that distinguishes release candidates from production cars.
> 
> ...


the RC do have VINs - if you go back to some of the earlier photos you can see the vin plates, but there really isn't any pix were you can make out the digits. I was actually wondering if the RCs started at #300 and went up from there. that would make the VIN #000003 and #000007 VIN numbers recently photographed make sense for the first few production cars.


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## MelindaV (Apr 2, 2016)

this is about the clearest one I could find, #374 from a June 10 sighting (and don't tell all the hatch people, but it has the "A" designation instead of the "E" designation)


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## garsh (Apr 4, 2016)

MelindaV said:


> (and don't tell all the hatch people, but it has the "A" designation instead of the "E" designation)


Perhaps that's how they're distinguishing the RCs then?


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## Rich M (Jul 28, 2017)

MelindaV said:


> this is about the clearest one I could find, #374 from a June 10 sighting (and don't tell all the hatch people, but it has the "A" designation instead of the "E" designation)
> View attachment 2299


Reddit Spotted 313 at the NYC Tesla event 2017-08-07 with E designation.


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## Model34mePlease (Jun 3, 2017)

That seems like a standard model 3 number. It looks like they just reserved a block of serial numbers in the 300 range for RCs. Probably the serial number will jump a bunch at some point. They probably wanted to reserve the low ones for 'prestige'

https://cdn.teslarati.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/MY2017_VIN-Decoder_MS_MX_M3.pdf

https://www.teslarati.com/decoding-tesla-model-3-vin/


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