- Joined
- Jan 22, 2025
- Threads
- 21
- Messages
- 189
- Reaction score
- 309
- Location
- United States
- Vehicle(s)
- 2025 Toyota 4Runner
- Thread starter
- #1
I was trying to get some more information on the status of my delivery and pieced together and updated information that I thought folks here might find this useful. Toyota has an unpublished/internal "dealer category" code for vehicles that progresses throughout the production and delivery process (which is difficult to lookup without a dealer spoon-feeding information).
The most useful codes appear to progress from "A" (allocation), to "F" (freight), to "G" (ground). I'm not going to regurgitate all the details I've learned about these codes, but a simple google search will reveal how these codes have been interpreted based on various experiences. In general, it appears that allocation (A) means the dealership has been assigned a vehicle and it is in some stage of production. Freight (F) means the vehicle has been built and is in transit (for 4Runners this generally means some stage from the factory to a port in Japan, then shipped to an overseas port, then transported within the destination country to a processing center or dealership). This is a fairly lengthy process that I've seen covered in detail in other threads on this website. I've seen a couple different interpretations of ground (G), but it appears this means the vehicle has arrived at the dealership and will be ready for the customer shortly thereafter.
Getting the dealer category code (and ETA) goes something like this for the time being (this information might have a short shelf life)...
Superfluous extra notes for those of you that like detail....
Evidently, there used to be a way to just put together a link with your VIN and lookup this information without the spec sheet link coming from the dealership. There was also an unofficial website that evidently made this easier so all you had to do was provide a VIN, but that link appears to be obsolete now. It appears the Toyota website was modified so some additional encoding is required in the URL, making it mandatory to get a link from your dealership/salesman. Perhaps this will change again, or someone will come up with a better way to extract this information.
Really, Toyota should just make this easier in the future! But I think this is really about keeping information in the hands of Toyota, its dealerships, and its sales staff since public access to this information would empower customers with a lot more leverage related to product selection and negotiating. I get it from their perspective. It's just annoying from my perspective. They could also just improve the web page to show this information to users with the private link rather than having to disassemble the web page's source code (I'm guessing they will "fix" this eventually).
I found this useful so that I can obsessively check status without harassing the salesperson I'm working with. My 4Runner happens to be in the "F" (freight) stage right now... somewhere between Japan and my local dealership. I wish I could know more about this. If you note the times that the status changes, you will probably have a better idea of your delivery date based on the additional information provided in other posts on this website about the production and delivery timeline. The ETA is also not displayed on the web page, but can be seen via the bizarre procedure I posted. Perhaps that is more useful than the status code, but I wanted to see how the status code lined up with the ETA and other peoples experience.
Yes, I know I can just hound my salesperson. I just found this interesting and thought other might as well. I take no credit for any of this. There's an old reddit post here where somebody went to the trouble to figure all of this out, but the process is a little out of date: (URL can not be formed from the VIN alone and there's a couple minor tweaks once you get to the webpage). I didn't see the additional hoops to update this procedure documented anywhere, so thought I'd put together my own notes and share them.
For "my" 4Runner, there is no public information on the dealership website. I was just given the spec sheet link. I thought this was interesting since you can generally see "a lot" of vehicles on dealership websites and searchable in Toyota inventory. Mine is not discoverable at all via inventory searches as far as I can tell. So the spec sheet link is all that I have.
The most useful codes appear to progress from "A" (allocation), to "F" (freight), to "G" (ground). I'm not going to regurgitate all the details I've learned about these codes, but a simple google search will reveal how these codes have been interpreted based on various experiences. In general, it appears that allocation (A) means the dealership has been assigned a vehicle and it is in some stage of production. Freight (F) means the vehicle has been built and is in transit (for 4Runners this generally means some stage from the factory to a port in Japan, then shipped to an overseas port, then transported within the destination country to a processing center or dealership). This is a fairly lengthy process that I've seen covered in detail in other threads on this website. I've seen a couple different interpretations of ground (G), but it appears this means the vehicle has arrived at the dealership and will be ready for the customer shortly thereafter.
Getting the dealer category code (and ETA) goes something like this for the time being (this information might have a short shelf life)...
- Ask your dealership/salesperson to send you a link for your vehicles spec sheet (via email or text). This is a URL they can generate from their system that starts out with "guest.dealer.toyota.com". The link itself does not contain a lot of information that is displayed. But there is information delivered "under the hood" that you can dig into to get more details. Open this link in Chrome or Brave (there's probably ways to do this in Edge and other browsers too). If they send you a PDF instead, ask for the web link again.
- Right click on the "Detail" tab/link. This will open a context menu.
- From the context menu that pops up, click on the "Inspect" link. It gets ugly from here if you're not a little bit of a tech geek.
- From the inspection/debugging information that is now presented to you, select the "Network" tab.
- Then refresh the page (F5 key).
- Now look for the element that starts with the letters "vspec" and select it.
- Then select the "Preview" tab.
- Finally, look for the dealerCategory value (and the ETA value might be interesting as well). Again, the "dealerCategory" value is just a single letter with an meaning that is not published by Toyota, but has varying interpretations based on user anecdotes.
- Repeat this process to see if/when this code changes.
Superfluous extra notes for those of you that like detail....
Evidently, there used to be a way to just put together a link with your VIN and lookup this information without the spec sheet link coming from the dealership. There was also an unofficial website that evidently made this easier so all you had to do was provide a VIN, but that link appears to be obsolete now. It appears the Toyota website was modified so some additional encoding is required in the URL, making it mandatory to get a link from your dealership/salesman. Perhaps this will change again, or someone will come up with a better way to extract this information.
Really, Toyota should just make this easier in the future! But I think this is really about keeping information in the hands of Toyota, its dealerships, and its sales staff since public access to this information would empower customers with a lot more leverage related to product selection and negotiating. I get it from their perspective. It's just annoying from my perspective. They could also just improve the web page to show this information to users with the private link rather than having to disassemble the web page's source code (I'm guessing they will "fix" this eventually).
I found this useful so that I can obsessively check status without harassing the salesperson I'm working with. My 4Runner happens to be in the "F" (freight) stage right now... somewhere between Japan and my local dealership. I wish I could know more about this. If you note the times that the status changes, you will probably have a better idea of your delivery date based on the additional information provided in other posts on this website about the production and delivery timeline. The ETA is also not displayed on the web page, but can be seen via the bizarre procedure I posted. Perhaps that is more useful than the status code, but I wanted to see how the status code lined up with the ETA and other peoples experience.
Yes, I know I can just hound my salesperson. I just found this interesting and thought other might as well. I take no credit for any of this. There's an old reddit post here where somebody went to the trouble to figure all of this out, but the process is a little out of date: (URL can not be formed from the VIN alone and there's a couple minor tweaks once you get to the webpage). I didn't see the additional hoops to update this procedure documented anywhere, so thought I'd put together my own notes and share them.
For "my" 4Runner, there is no public information on the dealership website. I was just given the spec sheet link. I thought this was interesting since you can generally see "a lot" of vehicles on dealership websites and searchable in Toyota inventory. Mine is not discoverable at all via inventory searches as far as I can tell. So the spec sheet link is all that I have.
Last edited:
