For BMW vehicles, there can be confusion between the year of manufacture and the model year. This has sometimes caused problems with titles and registrations with various States. The actual “model year” motorcycle could have been produced near the end of the prior calendar year, due to the BMW company-wide vacation month in August and restart of production immediately after that vacation, in September. There are exceptions & anomalies …most of these are such as when a BMW bike was manufactured even earlier and mysteriously is identified by BMW as the following year’s model. This has happened with some Airheads and some Classic K bikes now and then. There is sometimes additional confusion, because, for 1984, BMW stopped stamping the last 7 characters of the 17 character VIN, always a 7 digit number, next to the oil dipstick of all engines.

For very considerably more information about VIN and Serial numbers, how to read all 17 characters of VIN’s, the sequencing, the anomalies, etc. see the following article: http://bmwmotorcycletech.info/IDnumbrs.htm