Had an interesting visit with my local RMV here in Massachusetts today. My insurance company informed me that the Year on my new registration was incorrect. It read 1984 Harley Davidson instead of 2014 Harley Davidson. The people at the RMV said that Harley was reissuing VIN numbers again as the VIN number on my new 2014 RK came up as a 1984 Harley Davidson. They corrected it but I wonder if there is a 1984 out there with the same VIN number?

Has anyone ever heard of this before? It doesn't sound right to me.

Gary

 

Both 1984 and 2014 use the same 10th digit in the VIN, "E" to denote the model year of the vehicle.
Could be a case of the worker not entering the correct option when keying the data or the computer system has a bug. Either way, the likely hood of a bike from the 80's and now both having identical VIN's is very small.

 

in the early 70's they found lots of cases where as many as 4 different bikes ended up with the same vin#s. they just couldn't handle the vin format changing and being put on frames instead of engine cases at first. the factory also managed to loose a bunch of documentation on it around that time. very unlikely anymore.. someone just entered a number in wrong, or a computer wasn't programmed to decipher the difference.

 

Well, the VIN # on the title matches the VIN number on the Frame which matches the VIN on the registration. When they enter the VIN number in their computer it goes back to a 1984 bike. The RMV made the changes to the registration as they said they have seen it before with Harley Davidson. Just something to be aware of if you are registering a new bike as it might save you a return trip to the RMV to get it fixed.