Which Brands ETKA Covers, and What Every Other Make Uses Instead

ETKA covers the Volkswagen Group, and stops there

ETKA is short for Elektronischer Teilekatalog, and it belongs to one carmaker. It is the Volkswagen Group's own electronic parts catalog, and every vehicle it can identify carries a Volkswagen Group badge, because a manufacturer catalog is built from that manufacturer's own production records and holds nothing else.

It helps to have the group's own structure in front of you before looking at catalog boundaries, because the two do not line up as neatly as people expect. The group's brand overview, read on 28 August 2026, sets out ten core brands in three brand groups. Core holds Volkswagen, Volkswagen Commercial Vehicles, Škoda, SEAT and Cupra. Progressive holds Audi alongside Bentley, Lamborghini and Ducati. Sport Luxury consists of Porsche on its own. Membership of the group is one question. Which catalog holds the parts data is a different question, and the places where those two answers diverge are the places people get caught.

The brand list ETKA answers for is short enough to memorise, and worth memorising, because it settles the question at the counter in about two seconds.

• Volkswagen
• Audi
• Škoda
• SEAT
• Cupra, which sits on the same data as SEAT

What is not in it, and why the name travels anyway

Everything else on the road. No BMW, no Mercedes-Benz, no Renault, no Ford, no Toyota, no Chevrolet, no Hyundai. A Golf and a Transporter are as far as the badge range goes.

This is not the group withholding anything. Every carmaker maintains its own catalog off its own build records, so there are as many parts catalogs as there are manufacturer groups. The practical consequence for a mixed-make shop is that no single manufacturer system will ever cover the yard. The catalog you want is the one that belongs to the car on the ramp. Best does not come into it.

The reason the word travels so far beyond its own brands is a genuine coincidence of naming. ETKA stands for Elektronischer Teilekatalog. So does ETK, which is the BMW Group's catalog. One letter apart, the same German words behind both, two entirely separate data sets held by two competing manufacturers. Anybody who has heard both names spoken across a noisy workshop has a fair reason to assume they are the same product, and once that assumption is made it gets applied to every other badge as well.

These searches come from people who know a catalog by name and are applying it to a car it does not cover. That is a naming problem rather than a gap in anybody's knowledge, and it is solved by naming the system that owns the data instead.

Search term, real system, and the brands it answers for

Read the table below as a translation. The left column is what gets typed into a search box. The rest is what the vehicle in the bay actually needs.

Two things fall out of it. Most of these systems are group-wide rather than brand-wide, so one catalog answers several badges at once. And the badge on the boot lid is a poor guide to which catalog you want, so the group is the thing to identify first.

One caveat belongs on the Ford row. Microcat is a platform built by Infomedia and licensed to several manufacturers, so the name on its own does not mean Ford. The Ford data set is the one you want here, which is why the catalog is listed as Microcat (Ford) rather than as Microcat on its own.

Every system named in that table is held on this site. The links at the foot of this page open the ones people search for most: the ETKA hub, the BMW ETK catalog, the Mercedes EPC and XENTRY page, and Dialogys for Renault and Dacia.

ETKA BMW: the catalog you want is ETK

ETK is the BMW Group catalog. It covers BMW, MINI and Rolls-Royce on one data set under one numbering system, which means a MINI lookup and a BMW lookup are the same job in the same place.

The numbering is where the two catalogs separate cleanly, and that separation is useful at the counter rather than merely interesting. A BMW number runs to eleven digits with no letters, written as 34 11 6 794 300, and the opening pair classifies the part by system. A Volkswagen Group number looks nothing like it: three characters for the car line, three for the main group, three for the part, then index letters for the revision, as in 1K0 615 301 AB.

That difference is a quick desk check. If somebody has quoted you a number with trailing index letters for a BMW, or eleven bare digits for a Golf, the number came out of the wrong catalog and the conversation needs to go back a step before anything is ordered.

ETKA Mercedes: the system is the Mercedes EPC, inside XENTRY

Mercedes-Benz parts data sits in the manufacturer's own EPC, which reaches workshops through the XENTRY environment. It covers Mercedes-Benz and the Mercedes-built Smart models, which catches people out in the other direction: a Smart owner is told to look under Mercedes and assumes the counter is fobbing them off. The newer smart models, the #1 and #3, come out of a Mercedes-Benz and Geely joint venture and are built in China on a Geely platform, so those are a separate question from the Mercedes-built cars.

Mercedes-Benz also runs a B2B channel of its own, and the UK site describes it in as many words as a tool for independent workshops. Reading that site on 28 August 2026, the listed products include XENTRY WIS for workshop repair information, XENTRY Parts Information and XENTRY Operation Time, alongside ordering of genuine and remanufactured parts through an integrated parts catalogue. That is the manufacturer route, and it is worth knowing it exists rather than assuming dealers are the only ones with a way in.

The Mercedes number format is one of the most distinctive in the trade, which makes it easy to recognise on a box or an invoice. A 205 421 06 12 opens with a letter that classifies the part, A for a standard production part and N for a norm part, followed by the model series, then the group and the part identifier. A number starting with a bare letter and running ten digits after it is a Mercedes number, and almost nothing else uses that shape.

ETKA Renault: the system is Dialogys, and Dacia comes with it

Dialogys is Renault's after-sales documentation software, and the parts catalog is one part of a larger product. Repair procedures, wiring diagrams, technical notes and labour times live in the same place, so it is a broader thing than ETKA rather than a narrower one. Dacia sits on the same data, which is why a Duster lookup and a Clio lookup happen side by side.

Renault references carry the single most useful character in this part of the trade. A current reference runs to ten characters and closes with the letter R, as in 40 60 600 10R, and a letter can sit inside the block as well as at the end, as in 284B62069R. A reference ending in R belongs to Renault Group, and very little else does, so spotting that on a shelf label saves a phone call.

The leading pair is the other signal worth knowing, and it is about age rather than fitment. References beginning 77 belong to the older generation and those beginning 82 to the newer one. Plenty of long-lived components kept their original reference for years, so an old-looking number is not automatically wrong. It is a prompt to check the live catalog before the number goes on an order, because age is what tells you whether something has been superseded since it was issued.

ETKA Chevrolet: GM EPC, with the Opel trap right beside it

Chevrolet parts sit in GM EPC, which also holds GMC, Cadillac and Buick. The numbering is eight plain digits with no separators, such as 13591240, issued sequentially rather than coded by group.

That has a practical consequence worth pausing on, because it changes how the lookup has to be done. The number tells you nothing about what the part is. There is no group code to sanity check against, so a transposed digit will not look wrong to the eye, and a supplier quoting a number that is one digit out from the one you wanted gives you no signal at all. On a BMW or a Volkswagen Group number the shape itself catches that class of error. Here nothing does.

So the catalog carries more of the load on GM vehicles than it does elsewhere, and what you feed it matters more. Give it the full seventeen-character VIN rather than a model and a year, because the same nameplate covers several drivetrains, body styles and market builds in any given year, and the resulting part numbers differ without looking as though they should. Then read the number back off the diagram rather than off a note, and check it digit by digit against what you are about to order. A number with no internal logic has to be transcribed exactly, because there is no second chance to catch it later.

Opel and Vauxhall are the trap sitting next to it, and they catch experienced people rather than beginners. Anybody who remembers Opel and Chevrolet sharing showroom space in Europe, and who knows the two badges once sat under the same parent, will reach for GM EPC on an Astra at some point. Opel and Vauxhall are one catalog of their own, holding both badges, because the two are the same cars with different grilles and different steering wheel positions.

The numbering makes that mistake easy to miss. Opel numbers are also eight digits, historically written in three groups as 95 526 547, so an Opel number and a Chevrolet number look like each other on a printed label. Later parts from the Stellantis era may instead carry a ten-digit number ending in 80, which is the Peugeot and Citroen house format arriving with the change of owner. A workshop seeing both shapes on the same model has found the point where the parts bin changed hands, which is exactly what it looks like once you know to expect it.

One more caution about eight digits, and it applies well beyond these two makes. It is not a signature format. GM, Opel, the Fiat and Alfa Romeo side of Stellantis, Volvo and MG all issue eight plain digits. A bare eight-digit number on a box does not identify the make, so it is the one shape that should never be used as a shortcut.

Porsche and Cupra: the two edges, and the instinct is backwards on both

These are the cases that decide whether somebody actually understands the coverage, and the trade's instinct gets both of them the wrong way round.

Porsche is a Volkswagen Group brand, listed by the group as its own Sport Luxury brand group. Membership is real and the catalog is still separate. Current Porsche parts live in Porsche PET, and the numbering is its own: eleven characters opening with the model series, usually written as digits, as in 991 351 045 00, where 991 is the 911 of that generation. Letter suffixes turn up on some references, so it is not a digits-only format in practice. Classic Porsche material was carried in the group catalog, which is why the assumption has some history behind it rather than being simply wrong.

Cupra runs the other way. It is a recent brand with its own badge and its own showrooms, so people assume it must have its own catalog. It does not. Cupra is a Core group brand alongside SEAT and its parts sit on the SEAT data inside ETKA, Formentor included. Of every search in this article, etka cupra is the one that was correct from the start.

Bentley and Lamborghini sit between the two. Classic Bentley and Lamborghini material was carried in the group catalog historically, the same way classic Porsche was, and Bentley numbers still follow the familiar three-three-three shape with an index letter. Current Bentley parts are held here in a Bentley catalog of their own rather than in ETKA. Ducati is a group brand as well, and being a motorcycle maker it has no ETKA presence at all.

What to do when the make is not a Volkswagen Group car

The counter procedure is short, and it is the same three moves every time. Identify the group that owns the production data, open that group's system, and resolve the VIN inside it. Everything else follows from getting the first move right, because the badge on the car is the thing most likely to send you to the wrong place.

Identifying the group is mostly a matter of knowing the pairings that are not obvious. Cupra parts are SEAT parts. Dacia parts are Renault parts. MINI parts are BMW parts. Smart parts, on the Mercedes-built cars, are Mercedes parts. Lincoln sits with Ford, Lexus sits with Toyota, and GMC, Cadillac and Buick sit with Chevrolet. None of those relationships is visible from the boot lid, and each one is a search that fails silently if you get it wrong, because the catalog simply returns nothing rather than telling you why.

Once the system is open, the VIN does the rest of the work. Enter the seventeen characters rather than picking a model and a year from a list, because options, trim and market build move part numbers in every one of these systems, and a model-level match is exactly how a near-but-wrong part gets ordered. That is true on a Renault and a Chevrolet as much as on a Golf.

The shape of the number is worth using as a final check before anything is ordered, though only as a check. A number in the wrong shape for the make came from the wrong catalog and needs to go back a step. A number in the right shape has not been proven correct, because several groups share a shape. There is a full breakdown of the house formats by brand in the article linked below, and the free number lookup on this site will tell you every family a given number could belong to rather than guessing at one.