A broadcast sheet is the form that traveled with the car down the assembly line. It is roughly eleven by seventeen inches, perforated, dot-matrix-printed on continuous-feed paper with sprocket holes along one edge. Every option the car was ordered with — paint, trim, axle ratio, radio, even the exhaust tip — was either machine-printed by the order entry system or hand-stamped by line workers as the car came down. The sheet was supposed to be removed at end-of-line. In practice many were stuffed into seat springs, taped to the heater core, or left in the trunk. They survive there today: fragmentary, water-stained, sometimes burned, sometimes chewed by mice. A complete one is rare. A clean one is rarer.
The Vehicle Identification Number row at the top of the sheet is the most structurally protected information on the form, both because it sits at the top where the paper is usually intact and because every other cell can be cross-validated against the codes encoded into the VIN itself. When everything else is gone, the VIN row usually survives.