Code lists

Token policy

There are two kinds of value, with one rule each. (1) Where an EU or international instrument itself publishes the identifier as a code, the value is that code, verbatim and in its own form: the EN 16931 country code list (ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 plus XI and 1A), EU vehicle categories (M1, N1G, M1S, L3e-A1, T1b) and EU bodywork codes (AB, BA03). (2) Otherwise the registry owns the tokens: lower-case ASCII kebab-case (^[a-z0-9]+(-[a-z0-9]+)*$, at most 32 characters), in EU English and singular, taken from the legal wording where one exists (electricity, pure-electric, hybrid-electric, the ten CoC basic colours). Designations that follow a legislative sequence, such as Euro levels, are defined by a grammar over the instrument's own names (the 'Emission standard' names of Reg. (EU) 2017/1151 Annex I Appendix 6, e.g. euro-6d-isc-fcm), not by a closed enumeration. Official numeric or class codes are never written into BT-161; this covers IVI 2.0 EnergySource (10, 20, 95), CoC 23.1 classes (OVC-HEV, NOVC-HEV), the Appendix 6 character codes and KBA codes. The registry publishes versioned, machine-readable mappings to them instead, plus a mapping from national register colours (e.g. beige, cream) to the ten basic colours; the IVI mapping only after its licence is checked. Every open list has exactly one 'other'. VEHICLE-CONDITION partitions its test (new, used) and has none; a receiver treats an unknown token there as no statement. 'unknown' appears only in VEHICLE-ODOMETER-STATUS. Emitters write the exact form. Receivers match ASCII case-insensitively, keep an unknown token raw and treat it as 'other'. From 1.0, tokens are only added (in minor releases) and never removed, renamed or re-purposed. Booleans are 'true' or 'false' in lower case, 'false' is an active statement, and an absent row means no statement. Multi-valued facts repeat the key, one token per row; energySourceCode rows follow the order of the source document. List identifiers follow the root: VEHICLE-<NAME> <major.minor>. No list copies a vendor or marketplace enumeration: the draft colour, fuel, emission and condition lists were mapped 1:1 from such enumerations and have been rebuilt from the legal lists.

A minor release may add tokens; receivers treat a token they do not know like a missing value. Tokens are never removed or redefined. The naming of tokens follows the naming rules.

These values come from lists that VINvoice does not maintain. They are written exactly as the instrument publishes them; the key's grammar fixes the written form.

Each quantity has exactly one unit, fixed by its key and named with its UN/ECE Recommendation 20 code. The value is a bare number. When EN 16931-1:2026 adds a unit to item attributes (BT-212), the code below is the one to use.