WMI's, 565's and 566's

OK, in our last exciting installment we left with the train gathering speed, right? There's nothing like a nice dollop of government legislation to throw a few (well intentioned) curves in the way. If we were going to do this properly (and believe me we are!) then we needed to start grappling with CFR's, FMVSS, DOT, NHTSA and plenty more alphabet soup.

2008-12-02 1E9 / 458. What's that? That is our WMI number and it's date of issue. That's the date we became "recognized" - go ahead and look us up at: http://www.nhtsa.dot.gov/cars/rules/manufacture. WMI is our world manufacturer identifier. Now when we issue our VIN (vehicle identification number) anyone can look up who manufactured that fine piece of two-wheeled EV machinery. More than that we can interpret the VIN and tell you where and when we made it and what model it started out as. All that info is packed into the VIN and the 565 (or maybe it's the 566) - filing is the key to crack the code.

FMVSS stands for Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards - this is where the folks at the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration (NHTSA) codify the rules and regulations required to make a safe vehicle. For a motorcycle (which is any two or three wheeled vehicle with more than 5HP - the Department of Transport (DOT) don't care about no high falutin' terms like "maxi-scooter") there are CFRs (Code of Federal Regulations) applying to various aspects of the bike. Tires, lights, brakes, controls are the big ones for a motorcycle.

Now, here's a word of warning, FMVSS compliance is self-certified. If you think about it it has to be this way. The government doesn't have the time or resources to test every new vehicle. They rely on the manufacturers to follow the rules and to certify their products. The vast majority do. There are concerns that some may cut some corners. For example go look at the headlight lense on any vehicle. It should have a DOT marking to show that it's valid for use in the US market. At a large motorcycle dealership show we saw many import bikes on display that didn't appear to have all the apropriate DOT markings. Of course if one asked the vendor/manufacturer about the omission of such marks one would receive the answer "oh this is just a show bike" - we're not so sure we believe them...

However, our bike is fully FMVSS compliant. Every light lense, every brake component, the tires, the controls. The whole shooting match is composed of appropriately certified parts. It's our name on the line (or in this case our name is on the Products Liability insurance) so you can bet we made REAL sure of all this.

So now that we've detoured through administrivia (and defined some of the various acronyms) lets get back on to the main line and head towards the building of the bike.