Identifying the Age of a Vehicle for Commercial Safety and Forensic Purposes Using “Window Stamps”

Abstract

This paper deals with the issue of rapid, indicative identification of the age of a vehicle using time stamps on various components of the vehicle for technical, commercial, safety and forensic purposes. The main aim of the paper is the possibility of using markings of individual vehicle windows or “window stamps”, in which the times of production of the windows are encrypted in various ways. An analysis of time markings on vehicle windows was conducted on the basis of an extensive collection of photographs of windows from 980 basic vehicle models manufactured between 1991 and 2021, and acquired between 2015 and 2021 as part of the Europe-wide initiative eCall. Research found that 98.8% of all common motor vehicle window panes on the European market come with one of only three basic types of window stamps, which were named Euro-American, Japanese and Korean. The paper provides a detailed description of the structure and decoding of vehicle window stamps of the three specified basic types.