Glossary

A VIN (Vehicle Identification Number) is the 17-character identifier the manufacturer assigns to every car at the factory. It encodes the manufacturer, the country of origin, the model year, the plant and the car's unique serial number. The letters I, O and Q never appear in a VIN: they look too much like 1 and 0 and caused errors, so they were removed from the standard.

The 9th character of a VIN is a mathematical checksum calculated from the other 16 characters; its purpose is to catch a typo or a fabricated VIN. The standard (ISO 3779) is mandatory only for cars built for the North American market (required by NHTSA); in European and Japanese VINs a mismatch is common and is not a sign of fraud.

vPIC is the free, public database of the US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA). It decodes a VIN's manufacturer code (WMI) and descriptor section (VDS) into make, model, model year, engine type and factory equipment. vPIC contains factory specifications only — no accident or ownership history.

NMVTIS (National Motor Vehicle Title Information System) is the central database established by the US Congress. It consolidates records from every state's vehicle registry, from insurance companies and from salvage yards. It shows a car's title status (clean/salvage/flood/rebuilt), the officially recorded odometer readings and its total-loss history.

Both are authorised NMVTIS data providers and give baseline title and accident information. Carfax additionally uses its own, far larger archive (dealer service records, insurance detail), which is why it costs more; ClearVIN is lighter and cheaper and is based mainly on NMVTIS data.

All three are major US vehicle auction platforms, and they are where most cars imported into Georgia come from. Copart and IAAI mainly trade insurance and salvage vehicles, while Manheim is primarily a wholesale dealer-to-dealer auction.

Customs clearance is what you pay to register a car brought in from abroad in Georgia, and it has two parts: excise, which depends on the engine size and the age of the car, plus a fixed 480 ₾ in processing and registration fees. Right-hand drive triples the rate, while a hybrid gets a discount in the 0-6 year bracket. A private individual importing a passenger car pays no VAT and no import duty, so the car's market price plays no part in the calculation; the final amount is set by the Revenue Service at the moment of clearance.

The WMI (World Manufacturer Identifier) is the first three characters of a VIN and identifies the manufacturer and country of origin: the first character is the region (1, 4 and 5 for the USA, J for Japan, W for Germany, K for South Korea), the next two the specific manufacturer. The WMI is exactly what NHTSA vPIC reads when it derives the make and plant from a VIN. One model can carry several WMIs if it is assembled in more than one country.

A lot is a specific car put up for sale at auction. The lot page is where the photos, the damage description, the title status, the mileage, the location and the sale result come together. A lot number is the auction's internal identifier and does not replace the VIN: the same car can have several different lot numbers over the years if it was sold more than once.

A title is the official proof of ownership issued by a US state. The brand recorded on it describes the car's legal condition and stays in the record permanently, even after the car is repaired. That brand is what decides whether a car counts as clean or salvage, and it moves the price directly. NMVTIS consolidates the title records of every state.

Salvage is a title brand applied when an insurer declared the car a total loss and paid the owner out. The cause is not necessarily a collision: hail, flood, recovery after theft, or simply that the repair would have cost more than the car was worth. A salvage car is only allowed back on the road after an inspection and after the title is converted to rebuilt.

Rebuilt (or reconstructed) is the title a salvage car carries after it has been repaired and has passed the state's inspection. The brand confirms the car was allowed back on the road; it does not confirm the quality of the repair and it does not erase the accident history — the record keeps both the salvage and the rebuilt entry. On the used market such a car is markedly cheaper than one with a clean title.

A clean title means no insurance total loss or other severe brand has been recorded against the car. ⚠ A clean title is not proof that the car was never in an accident: damage that never went through an insurer, or was never declared a total loss, leaves no trace on the title. One distinction matters just as much — “clean” can only be said when a record actually exists; the absence of a record is not evidence of a clean history.

A total loss is an insurer's decision, not a technical verdict: it is declared when the estimated repair cost exceeds a set share of the car's market value (often 70-80%, depending on the state). That is why an expensive car can be totalled with light damage while a cheap one with heavy damage is not. A total loss appears in the NMVTIS record and a salvage title brand follows it.

Run and Drive is the auction's note that at the time the lot was checked, the car started under its own power and moved a few metres. It is not a test drive and it says nothing about the condition of the engine or the transmission: the check lasts seconds and records only what happened in that moment. The other common note, “starts”, is weaker still — the car started but did not move.

The auction fills in two fields: primary damage is the main reason the car ended up at auction, secondary is additional damage. Both are a visual assessment by an auction employee, not an inspection — they cannot describe hidden damage to the frame, the fuel tank or the electronics. This is exactly why free aggregators often show only one of the two fields for the same lot, while an official report shows both.

An odometer record is the mileage officially captured on a specific date — at registration, inspection or sale. A discrepancy appears when a later reading is lower than an earlier one, which is direct evidence of a rollback. The NMVTIS brand “not actual mileage” means precisely that. A zero reading in a record is not a fact; it means the figure was never reported.

Excise is the main part of customs clearance and is multiplied by engine displacement: 1.5 ₾ per cm³ for a car aged 0-6 years, and 4.5 ₾ above six years (Tax Code article 188, law №1477 of 1 April 2026, in force from 2026-04-02). Age counts from the year of declaration, not from the date of purchase, so on 1 January every car gets a year “older”. Electric vehicles pay no excise.

For a right-hand-drive car (the Japanese domestic market) the excise rate is tripled — article 188 §15/§16. In practice this is the single largest factor: on a 2.0-litre petrol car aged eight years ordinary clearance is 9,480 ₾, while right-hand drive comes to 27,480 ₾. A right-hand-drive electric vehicle pays a flat 3,000 ₾ (§17), and the hybrid discount does not apply to right-hand drive at all.

It does, but narrowly: a left-hand-drive hybrid gets 60% off the excise only while the car is 0-6 years old (article 188 §14). Past six years the discount no longer applies and the rate is the ordinary 4.5 ₾ per cm³ — this is the most common mistake in estimating import cost. A right-hand-drive hybrid gets no discount, and does get the tripled rate.

Landed cost has six parts: the hammer price at auction, the auction fee, inland transport to a US port, ocean freight, port charges in Poti or Batumi, and customs clearance. The hammer price is often less than half of the total, which is why deciding on it alone is a mistake. Excise is set by law and can be calculated exactly, while transport and freight depend on your forwarder — so the total is always a range, never a single number.