Of course, it will be strange if the difference is more than a year or two. The year in the code means the model year of the motor, but not the year when it was manufactured. If you wish to buy a bike, the owner tells you the year, but the Yamaha ATV VIN decoder gives you another year, don't panic. If you see any other letters and the owner of the bike looks suspicious, you should definitely decode the full code to compare the bike you see with the data from the decoder. Y stands for Yamaha, the label of the company and A determines the type of the vehicle. The Yamaha VIN decoder will tell you that J stands for Japan, the country where it was manufactured.
The VIN code usually starts with the letters such as JYA that refer to the world manufacturer code.
If you buy a newer version of the bike, you will see a 17-characters code on the registration card that can tell you all the specs about it. The number was shorter, however, it can be decoded into the new VIN. So if you plan to buy a bike of that year, the Yamaha VIN decoder can ask you to add a few more characters. Most of the manufacturers had nine months to implement this new rule on their assemblies. Yamaha wasn't an exception in this matter. Manufacturers used the numbers to identify the vehicles in the way they wanted until the 1980s.
