Cookies

This site sets no cookies. Not a functional one, not an analytics one, not a third-party one. There is no banner asking you to accept them because there is nothing to accept.

Why there is nothing to ask about

A consent banner exists to ask permission to store or read something on your device that the site does not strictly need. This site stores nothing on your device at all today. The pages are static files, there is no account to keep you signed in to, no preference to remember and no advertising network to hand an identifier to — so the question a banner asks would have no subject.

You can check that rather than believe it. Open your browser's developer tools, look at the storage or application panel, and the cookie list for this site is empty on every page.

What this site does instead of cookies

Page views and two events are counted by a self-hosted, cookieless analytics service at analytics.pagefabrica.com. It sets no cookie and no persistent browser identifier, builds no cross-site profile, and honours the Do Not Track setting your browser sends. The two events are work_started — a calculation was submitted — and work_completed — a result was produced. Each is a name and nothing else: no property carries a price, a rate, a tire size or a result, and the code that sends them accepts no property to carry one. The privacy page describes them in full.

Blocking that collector, or turning Do Not Track on, changes nothing about the calculators. They are arithmetic running in this page and they do not consult it.

Storage this site does not use today

• No cookies, first-party or third-party.
• No local storage on any calculator page. Reload one and it returns to its worked example, which is the visible consequence of keeping nothing. The decoder writes a single version string, described below.
• No IndexedDB, and no session storage. The Cache API is the one exception, and the next section sets out exactly what goes in it.
• No advertising or analytics cookies from anyone else, because no third-party script is loaded beyond the cookieless collector named above.

Your browser's ordinary HTTP cache still holds the pages, the stylesheet and the scripts, as it does for every site you visit. That is a browser behaviour rather than something this site writes, we cannot read it, and your browser settings clear it.

The two things the VIN decoder stores

Neither exists until you decode a VIN. Load this site, use the calculators, read every page, and your browser holds nothing of ours at all. Press Decode once and two things appear:

• The vehicle database, in the Cache API. A compressed copy of NHTSA's public pattern database, a little over four megabytes, fetched once and kept so that later decodes need no network at all. It is public reference data, byte-for-byte identical for every visitor, and it says nothing about you.
• One version string, in local storage. The key vpic-payload-version holding 2026-08, so that when a newer release of the database ships, the old copy can be recognised and deleted rather than left occupying four megabytes for ever. It names a monthly release of a public dataset, not a person, and it is not an identifier of any kind.

Neither of them is a cookie, neither is sent anywhere, and a VIN you type appears in neither — nor anywhere else. If storage is unavailable, or you have cleared it, or you are in a private window, the decoder still works: it simply fetches the database again. You can delete both from the storage panel of your browser's developer tools at any time, and the only consequence is one more download.

Questions or corrections

If anything on this page does not match what your browser shows you, that is a bug and we want to hear about it: contact.