Hey guys, I wanted to ask about vin sticker locations on an evo IX. I recently bought a mint evo IX and I noticed it was missing a vin sticker under the hood. All other doors, fenders, bumper and trunk have the stickers but the hood doesn’t. There are no signs that it’s a replacement hood, paint matches perfect, all other emissions stickers and other stickers are under the hood, no overspray, all seals and insulation look original, and there’s no sign that there was ever a sticker in the normal spot I’ve seen on other cars. Does anyone else not have a sticker under their OEM hood? It’s normal location is on the upper left edge of the hood (see pic below)

 

Heres my VIN label. Its certainly possible they failed to add that yours. A quality control error.

It happens! But that little detail would make me think as well

@Austinosu

 

Thanks for the reply!

Im thinking the same thing as you, it could easily be a quality error from the factory. My car is red so it would be pretty hard to get a perfect match with a repaint and the hood perfect matches the rest of the car.

Im guessing just a factory problem, but it’s going to bother me now that I noticed it haha

 

Extremely unlikely that it was somehow forgotten at the factory. I’ve been involved with many, many, many CT9A Evos, and I’ve never seen one missing except there was a story behind it, and that story was never because Mitsubishi forgot it.

RR Evos commonly had and still have CF hoods swapped onto them. I’d consider that to be more likely as to why there is no VIN on the current hood. A prior owner of the car may have swapped out hoods with a RR hood from another car prior to getting rid of it, and simply removed the non-matching VIN. That to me is a much more likely scenario than it being left off at the factory, especially considering that all the other stickers are on the hood and all the other VIN stickers are on the car as well.

 

Also, sometimes you can just look at the bolts on the hinges. You can sometimes tell if the hood has been off that way. If the person swapping the hood is careful though, then that’s not a sure way to know. It’s just if the bolts have marks on the RR paint, it’s easy to know it’s been messed with.

 

I will say, when I had my Evo 9 the vin badges on the fenders were starting to fall off. I detailed the engine bay regularly so I'm not sure if that was the main factor as to why it happened but all body panels were original.