About this site

This site provides means to identify and understand the origin of Volkswagen Type 2 busses from years 1967 to 1979. At this time, via an online M-Plate decoder, but it might expand in the future. M-Plates were metallic plates present in all VW busses, which contained a set of alphanumeric production codes to identify a vehicle.

The site was created as a result of the original VW M-Plate decoder going offline, as a personal project to decode the author's own M-Plate and to experiment with code. From there, it evolved into a public website to share this tool with other vintage bus owners from the aircooled community.

The data used to decode the M-plates comes mainly from these sources, and keeps getting expanded every time a user finds out more about an unknown code and shares it with the community:

Thanks so much to the authors of those resources and to everyone who share their knowledge. The M-plate decoder would not have been possible without that vast collaborative effort.

Privacy policy

This is a hobby site without a commercial purpose and without intention to seek financial profit. The stored database data will never be submitted to third parties or used for other purposes than improving the site and providing a better service to its users.

The code for this site is Open Source. You can explore it and contribute to the vw-type2-id project on GitLab.

The site's backend has a database that stores:

  • The original data submitted through the M-plate form, along with some of the decoded values computed from that data (e.g. model year in readable form).
  • The creation date and last update date of the submitted M-plate data.
  • If the user has chosen to create an account on the site, their user name, e-mail and last login date.

If you've used this service without creating an account and would like to have the data for a particular M-plate removed or amended, feel free to contact the author. If you have created an account, you already have full control over your data and should be able to either remove or change the data on the My M-plates section.

Disclaimer

The decoded vehicle data produced on this site comes from multiple sources. Despite best efforts to provide accurate data, it has to be noted that it comes from volunteer research over 40+ years of history of these vehicles.

As such, data is neither guaranteed to be accurate nor to have any legal validity. It should be considered as orientative only.

Contact

If you've got feedback or questions about the site, feel free to get in touch.