More returns come from this one mistake than from every other cause combined. Someone orders the set for the year on their registration papers, and the set that arrives was moulded for a different floor.

The fix takes about a minute, and the car will tell you the answer in two separate places.

Why the delivery year is the wrong number

Cars are built continuously and sold in batches. A car that came down the line in October or November very often sits in a compound, then on a ship, then in a dealer yard, and reaches its owner the following year.

That car is a 2023 build wearing 2024 paperwork. The moulding was designed around the 2023 floor. Order by the paperwork and you get the wrong set.

The gap runs the other way too, though less often. Either way, the rule is the same: the tooling follows the build date, so you have to as well.

Where to look, first option: the plate

Most cars carry a metal or foil plate showing the date of manufacture as a month and year. Check these places, in this order:

The wording varies. Date of manufacture, build date, MFG date and month/year of production all mean the same thing. What you want is a month and a year, usually written as 11/2023 or 2023-11.

Where to look, second option: the VIN

If there is no plate, or the plate is unreadable, the VIN gives you the same answer. It is 17 characters, and the tenth character encodes the model year.

The letters skip around because I, O, Q, U and Z are never used, and neither is the digit 0. They look too much like other characters, so the standard leaves them out. If you try to count the alphabet in order you will land a year or two off.

The VIN is on the windscreen base on the driver's side, visible from outside the car, and usually on the same plate as the build date.

When the two disagree

They will sometimes differ by one. A car built in December 2023 can carry a VIN coded for the 2024 model year, because the manufacturer had already rolled over to the new model year internally.

When that happens, go with the plate. The physical date of manufacture is what the interior tooling actually follows. The VIN model year is a commercial designation, and it moves ahead of the production change more often than behind it.

What to do if you are on a boundary

Some sets are listed as 2022-2024 and the next one starts at 2025. If your car was built in the last months of 2024, you are on the edge of that boundary and it is worth a message rather than a guess.

Send the month and year of manufacture, not just the year. A car built 02/2024 and a car built 12/2024 are both 2024 cars, and they do not always take the same set.

A note on used cars

If you bought the car second-hand, the paperwork is even less reliable. Registration years, first-registration dates and advertised years all drift from the build date, sometimes by more than a year if the car was imported or sat unsold.

Open the driver's door and read the plate. It has not changed since the car was made, whatever the ad said.

The short version

Related reading

For why manufacturers change the floor at all, see why model years change mid-cycle. For a car where this matters more than most, the BYD Seal has three different mat sets across three build years, and the Denza D9 has three items covering three different year ranges.