Production Numbers by colors

[Benz280]

Given that colors identified on data cards ( as identified by MB ) as not all owners have Data Cards. Would be interesting to see production by color ( Exterior / Interior ).
Has anyone identified such a report ? 

[114015]

Yes...,
Basically something like what you are looking for does somehow exist...
Mercedes-Benz presented internally  an overview which kind of (group of) paints where most popular in the sixties with their passenger cars and also how this changed from one timepoint towards the other (let's say from 1963 towards 1968). I saw this brief "overview" in one of the club magazines, maybe 8 or 10 years ago or so but I don't remember anymore which one it was.
Clearly this was a general and brief overview about all of the Mercedes passenger cars back then, not detailed by individual color codes (like the "whites" 717 and 050 or so) but rather "clustered (all reds, all whites etc.) and certainly not by individual car models (like our SLs).

Please consider that the production of our cars was done in the pre-computer area, and modern precise and detailled overviews as we are used to today based on pretty easy access to any kind of electronic data, this was just not possible in the sixties. Basically everything was "handwritten" (or by typewriter) internally back then. All necessary data could theoretically be compiled from the datacards... just if there were a summerbreak student or so visiting the Archive and feeding all these data from the 48,912 datacards into a large MS Excel (or similar) table.
Then these kind of overviews would be easy...,
but the reality is sadly a bit different.

Also, please consider, not only did the "taste" among (potential) buyers for the colors change over the years,
but also many of our cars were resprayed with a non-datacard color code today. Common today's popular colors are e.g. all the "metallics" which clearly weren't as much back then during production. The opposite counts for all the "pastel" colors, which are generally much less popular today. This fact also distracts from the correct statistics.

Well, I remember also that the German SL Club prepared a paint code overview among their members' cars: How were they delivered and how are they today? This overview was published some 15 years ago..., I have to look up whether I can still find this overview.

Sorry please that I do not have better news for now.

Achim

[Benz280]

Thank you Achim, sounds as if something may popup in some dusty file somewhere, someday