How a rooftop joins a nameplate

A rooftop is one physical store. Intelligence is the factory directory. They meet on a nameplate page when this lot’s vehicles match a brand + nameplate + generation year range. That join is YMM — year, make, model — not VIN-as-national-volume and not a list of other stores.

Make must match the brand (Toyota to Toyota). Model must match the nameplate (RAV4 to RAV4). Year must fall inside a generation’s year-from / year-to (open-ended generations count as present). Compact compare keys ignore spaces and punctuation so F-150 and F150 meet. If the year is outside every generation on that nameplate, the unit does not join.

Settings country scopes what the desk treats as offered. nameplate_markets records whether the factory offered that nameplate in an ISO market. Offered is not a sales count. A nameplate can be official in the United States and absent in another country without implying how many this city sold.

On the nameplate page, in-stock means rooftop units whose status is available or pending. Sold units can still prove the YMM join for history, but they are not on_lot. Factory paints pick up on_lot when a unit exterior colour matches an official marketing name (grey/gray and “metallic” suffixes are normalized). Paint codes are only used when they are real OEM codes — seed rows leave codes null rather than invent them.

The join never copies asking price, APR, or days-in-stock onto the factory row. Those facts stay on the inventory card. Catalog stills on the generation remain factory examples. PhotoBooth chips are the palette, not proof that every colour sits on this lot.

Use the join to brief “we have this nameplate in these colours” and to open the matching stock units. If YMM does not match, do not force a nameplate. Official production names only — speculative or unofficial model names stay out of the directory until they are factory names.