Finding a car by plate, VIN or year, make and model

Everywhere Torqix asks what car you are working on — the customer record, the start of an estimate, your public work request form and your online booking page — it asks in Enter License Plate, VIN, or Year/Make/Model: one box that takes all three. Type what is in front of you and press the magnifier, or Enter. On the two public pages the box appears only once you have switched the vehicle lookup on in Online requests & booking; without it those pages ask for the car in plain fields, which is what they have always done.

It asks your own records first. Type a plate you have seen before and the first thing you get is that car, whose it is, and when it was last in, with a link to open it — not a fresh decode that would put a second row in your list for a car you have known for years. Two rows for one car split its history and its mileage, so the next advisor sees a vehicle with no past and no reminder ever fires.

The state under the box

Under the box is one line: Show license plate results for and the state, which is a chooser. A plate is only unique inside one state or country — the same letters and numbers are on a different car three states over — so a lookup cannot run without one.

Set the one your customers usually come from once, in Settings › Online requests & booking › Looking a vehicle up, under State your plates usually come from. Every chooser then starts there — yours and the one on your public form — and anyone with a car plated elsewhere changes it in one control. Leave it on Ask every time and the line reads choose a state until somebody picks one; nothing is guessed, because a plate looked up in the wrong state comes back as somebody else's car.

When plate lookup is not set up

Plate data comes from an outside registry service, and one has to be signed and connected before any plate can be looked up. Until then, no Look up this plate button is drawn anywhere. The screen says plate search is unavailable and asks for a VIN or vehicle details instead. A button that could only fail is worse than no button, because it teaches everybody that the lookup is broken.

A plate lookup is a paid call

Searching costs nothing — that is your own records. Pressing Look up this plate is a billed call to the registry, so it is always a separate press on a button that says what it is, never something that happens while you type. Every one is written to your audit trail, and so is pressing Not this car — that second row is how we tell whether the registry is any good, so use it when the answer is wrong.

On your public form the same rule holds and there is a limit per hour behind it, so nobody can run up a bill from a script. A visitor pressing the search several times can never use up their one request: the two are counted separately.

Reading a result

Every row is three lines: the car, its engine, and its VIN split in two after the ninth character.

2018 BMW 340i xDrive Base

Year, make, model and sub model — whatever the source actually said, and nothing filled in for it.

3.0L I6 (B58B30M0) Turbocharged GAS FI

The engine, from the VIN. Displacement, cylinders, the engine code in brackets, then whether it is turbocharged, the fuel and how it is delivered — the line a parts counter reads back to you.

WBA8B7C5X JA586275

The VIN. The break falls after the ninth character because that is where a VIN divides: what the car IS on the left, its serial on the right.

A decode always says where it came from, in words — From the plate registry and the VIN decoder. — and a plate result carries how sure the registry is. On a customer's record, Add as a new car on a decoded VIN saves the car in one press, and Edit first fills the fields below instead. Use this vehicle (on a plate result, or on a decode in New estimate) fills the fields too. Whatever was filled, nothing is saved until you press Add vehicle or Create estimate, and you can change every field first.

Typing a car in

Press Enter Vehicle Manually at the top right of the card for Year, Make, Model, Sub Model, VIN, License Plate and Type. Back to Vehicle Search is in the same corner. Sub model is a box you can type in now — write the trim on the door, xDrive Base, and it is stored with the car. A customer typing one on a public page has no car for it to be stored on yet, so it arrives on the enquiry's vehicle line beside their plate and VIN, and becomes part of the vehicle when you convert the enquiry. Type is a service-writer's field and is not asked for on the public pages.

What the vehicle catalogue adds is not the same on every screen. On your online booking page, Make and Model suggest as you type. On a customer record and at the start of an estimate there is no type-ahead — what the catalogue gives those two is the search itself. Your public work request form has neither and takes the words the customer typed. With no catalogue loaded, every one of them is an ordinary text box and nothing is lost.

Typing the car the way you would say it

Type the year, make and model in any order — 1995 bmw m3, bmw m3 95, even bwm m3 or chevy silverado — and you do not need to press Enter. Your own matching cars come first. Under them the car is offered as a new one, with up to five close models from NHTSA's free vehicle catalogue. On a customer's record, Add as a new car saves that car in one press, and Edit first fills year, make and model in so you can correct them before Add vehicle. In New estimate, Add as a new car fills them in and the car is saved with the estimate.

Each row says where its name came from: From the vehicle catalogue (NHTSA). or As typed. If NHTSA does not answer, the car you typed is still offered and the row says so. Only the make and the year are sent to NHTSA, never your customer, plate or shop.

On a phone or a tablet with no signal, the manual fields are what the page shows and what it sends. The search box is the extra, not the floor.