One of the purposes of vehicle documents is to enable the identification of vehicles in a comparable way as an identity card identifies a person. The errorfree issuing of the documents, that consist of the
Vehicle Registration Certificate Part I PDF, 267KB, File does not meet accessibility standards
(only in German)and
Vehicle Registration Certificate Part II PDF, 859KB, File does not meet accessibility standards
(only in German)has an essential role in this regard.
The data base therefore provided by the KBA reaches back to the early 1970’s. Vehicle-related data are drawn from it in the scope of the Type Approval procedure and were at first provided to vehicle registration authorities as data sheets.
The national data sheets were replaced within the transition to EU harmonized licensing documents. The type data of vehicles corresponding to the new Vehicle registration documents are available since 2005.
Because of the high data quality, registration procedures have been shortened and errors in the Central Vehicle Register minimized. The data sets are mainly, provided electronically by vehicle manufacturers and importers. And after verification, automatically completed with official data such as the TSN (Typschlüsselnummer) which are important e.g. for insurance companies and vehicle part dealers.
Various publications of the type data are additionally available.
The standards for the transmission of CoC data can be found here.