Don't buy an imported car with a hidden past.

This is the single most important thing to understand before you pay for any VIN-based check on a New Zealand car, and almost nobody explains it. A 17-character VIN is normally stamped by the manufacturer, and characters four to nine describe the model, body, engine family and restraint system exactly as the factory built it. That is what a VIN decoder reads.

Japanese-market vehicles are not built to that standard. They carry a chassis number instead — something in the shape of ZRE172-1234567 or GF-BH5-098765 — which is shorter, differently structured, and not a VIN at all. When such a car is complied for New Zealand roads it is given a New Zealand VIN, in the world-manufacturer range that international standards allocate to New Zealand. In the country's publicly published vehicle register, roughly four in ten passenger cars and vans carry one of those New Zealand-assigned VINs, and the great majority of them are used imports from Japan.

Those seventeen characters are a valid, unique New Zealand identifier. They are not a factory record. Nothing in positions four to nine was written by Toyota, Nissan, Mazda, Honda or Subaru, so no decoder on earth — ours included — can recover the original grade, engine variant or factory options from them. Any service that returns a confident, detailed factory specification for a 7A-prefixed VIN is guessing from the make and model text, not decoding.

What you should do instead is find the original identifier. On a Japanese import it is usually still there: on the firewall plate in the engine bay, on the plate at the base of the B-pillar, or printed on the de-registration certificate the importer holds. That chassis number is the key that unlocks the Japanese-side documentation — the auction sheet, the export certificate and the odometer reading recorded at export.

Odometer tampering in New Zealand is mostly not a New Zealand crime. It happens in the gap between the last reading recorded overseas and the first reading recorded here, because in that gap nobody with an official record is watching. A car that left its origin market at 180,000 km can be presented at a New Zealand yard at 98,000 km, and unless someone goes back to the export paperwork, the lower number is simply what everybody works from afterwards.

This is why the export documentation matters so much more here than it would in Europe, where a chain of periodic inspections keeps a running record. Ask for the de-registration or export certificate and the auction sheet, and compare the kilometres on them against the dash. If the seller cannot produce either document for an imported car, treat the odometer as unverified rather than as correct — that is the honest reading, and it is the reading a careful buyer takes.

The other reading worth having is the last inspection record on the car in New Zealand, which is checked at a fixed interval and gives you at least one dated local data point. A trajectory that runs flat, or backwards, between two inspections is the clearest signal available to a private buyer.

New Zealand reads odometers in kilometres, which sounds trivial until an American-market import is involved: a car built for the United States records miles, and 90,000 on its dash is 145,000 km, not 90,000 km. It is a small, recurring source of accidental over-payment on US imports, and it is worth confirming which unit a dash is displaying before you compare a price to anything.

Right-hand drive keeps Japanese and British cars usable here without conversion, which is why they dominate the import flow. Cars converted from left-hand drive are a different proposition entirely and should be inspected as a modified vehicle, not as a standard one. And because emission and safety standards differ between the market a car was built for and the market it ends up in, an import can be entirely legitimate here while carrying equipment that differs from the same nameplate sold new in New Zealand.