ultravin 0.0.2

Pure-Rust NHTSA vPIC VIN decoder — CLI + library, with spVinDecode parity.

ultravin

A fast, pure-Rust NHTSA vPIC VIN decoder shipped as a Python library. It's a faithful port of vPIC's spVinDecode — byte-for-byte parity with the reference Postgres procedure, verified across every decodable VIN. The vehicle database is baked into the binary, so decoding is fully offline: no network, no database, no data files.

Install

pip install ultravin

Prebuilt wheels require Python 3.10+; nothing else (the data ships inside the wheel). From source you'll also need a Rust toolchain:

pip install .          # or: make build-dev  (maturin develop into a venv)

Use it from Python

import ultravin

r = ultravin.decode("1HGCM82633A004352")

r["model_year"]         # 2003
r["wmi"]                # '1HG'
r["check_digit_valid"]  # True
r["error_codes"]        # [0]

# `elements` is the full decoded attribute list; index it by variable name:
attrs = {e["variable"]: e["value"] for e in r["elements"]}
attrs["Make"]           # 'HONDA'
attrs["Model"]          # 'Accord'

decode(vin) returns a dict with keys vin, wmi, descriptor, model_year, error_codes, check_digit_valid, corrected_vin, and elements — a list of per-attribute dicts (group_name, variable, value, element_id, source, …).

Decode many at once:

results = ultravin.decode_batch(["1HGCM82633A004352", "5YJ3E1EA7JF000000"])

Use it from the command line

ultravin decode 1HGCM82633A004352          # human-readable table
ultravin decode 1HGCM82633A004352 --json   # full JSON
ultravin decode-batch vins.txt --json      # one VIN per line
ultravin version

Benchmarks

Warm decode of the same VIN (1HGCM82633A004352), lower is faster:

Decoding on Apple Silicon. ultravin runs in-process with the database embedded; the others are listed for reference.

engine	warm decode	VIN/s (single stream)	vs ultravin	notes
ultravin (Rust, in-process)	~0.20 ms (203 µs)	~4,900	1×	data embedded; ~1.3 ms cold start; ~31k VIN/s batched on 10 cores
corgi v3 — @cardog/corgi (binary index)	~12 ms	~83	~59× slower	project's published figure
corgi v2 — @cardog/corgi 2.0.1 (SQLite)	~30 ms	~33	~148× slower	project's published figure
NHTSA spVinDecode (Postgres)	~62 ms	~16	~300× slower	full SQL round-trip over localhost

ultravin decodes a VIN ~60× faster than corgi v3, ~150× faster than corgi v2, and ~300× faster than the reference Postgres procedure — with the whole vehicle database embedded (≈19 MB compressed in the wheel) and no DB or network at runtime.

VIN/s above is single-stream (one sequential caller, ≈ 1 ÷ warm decode); ultravin additionally batches in parallel to ~31,000 VIN/s on 10 cores.

The corgi figures are its project's own published numbers (not re-measured here); ultravin and Postgres were measured locally. Full methodology, baselines, and reproduction steps are in BENCHMARKS.md.