A public registry built from federal certification records
Nobody will tell you who actually built your scooter. The federal record will.
Hundreds of American brand names sell Chinese-built scooters, ATVs, UTVs and go-karts. Most are the same handful of factories wearing different badges. When the importer disappears — and they do — the badge on the bodywork tells you nothing about where to find a part.
Every US-market machine has to be certified with the EPA before it can be sold, and that filing names the factory that built the engine. This registry reconciles 4,858 of those certificates into something you can actually search.
- Chinese engine factories
- 325
- US brands on record
- 341
- Certificates
- 4,858
- Model years covered
- 2006–2027
Three ways in
Work from whatever your machine still has on it. The sticker is the most precise; the badge is the last resort.
The factories behind the badges
All 98 multi-brand factories →98 Chinese factories on the record supply more than one American brand. These are the largest.
| Factory | US brands | Model years | Engine families |
|---|---|---|---|
| Chongqing Loncin | 55 | 2006–2027 | 232 |
| Chongqing Zongshen | 25 | 2007–2027 | 227 |
| Lifan | 25 | 2007–2026 | 168 |
| Zhejiang Jinlang | 23 | 2008–2026 | 130 |
| Taizhou Zhongneng (ZNEN) | 20 | 2008–2026 | 172 |
| Chongqing Shineray | 13 | 2006–2026 | 59 |
Badge twins
All 145 cohorts →One factory, one engine size, many American badges. If your brand has vanished, these are the machines most likely to share your engine — and the ones whose parts are worth measuring against yours.
- Taizhou Zhongneng (ZNEN) · 49-50cc17 American brands · 2008–2026
- Taizhou Zhongneng (ZNEN) · 150cc17 American brands · 2009–2026
- Chongqing Loncin · 250cc15 American brands · 2007–2027
- Chongqing Loncin · 49-50cc10 American brands · 2006–2024
- Chongqing Zongshen · 200cc9 American brands · 2007–2026
- Lifan · 100cc9 American brands · 2007–2026
From the blog
All posts →- IdentificationRead your engine family number in 60 secondsFour facts are encoded in the code on your emission label: model year, importer, road or off-road, and engine size. Here is how to read each one.
- The industryThe ten factories behind most American machinesOne factory supplies 55 American brands. Nine more supply another 145 between them. The federal record, ranked.
- IdentificationWho actually makes TaoTao?TaoTao USA certified 109 machines across ten model years using two different Chinese factories. Which one built yours depends on the year.
Why this had to be built by hand
The EPA publishes the certification records as two spreadsheets. They are free, and they are almost unusable as they stand: each American importer types the Chinese factory's name into the form freehand, so one factory appears as a dozen different companies. Nothing in the federal data connects them.
Chongqing Loncin is filed under thirteen different spellings. Taizhou Zhongneng appears as five. There are misspellings — Congqing, Ghangzhou, Zheijiangtaotao — and at least one filing where the importer typed same as OEM 1 above into the manufacturer field.
Reconciling 628 raw spellings down to 325 real factories is the work. Every merge decision is written down, with its reasoning, in a file you can read.