This is a slightly long (and somewhat boring) treatise on the VIN numbers in our Car Registry.
Our Car Registry was looking a little ragged with VIN numbers in varying formats, cars listed that were not Pagodas, missing data, and more.
In a moment of idle time (actually a few hours), and thanks to our Admin Peter for sending me an editable copy of the Registry, I tried to clean things up a bit.
I re-entered the VIN numbers to be consistent with the format used on the MB data cards. A Sort of the VIN column now allows display of similar models and trannies together; you can now more easily locate the oldest or youngest car within a model group; or find the car with the VIN number closest to yours; and do other trivial searches.
The Registry (along with many other of the website pages) will eventually migrate to a Wiki format. Sorting by column may not be available in the Wiki format. If sorting is not possible, I for one (and maybe the only one) will be saddened by the loss of flexibility.
If interested in playing with the Registry, take a look at the changes. There are a few out-of-sort items due to my carelessness in making entries; perhaps these will be corrected in a later edit. Also some owners did not make entries in all of the columns so the data for some cars is incomplete.
A hint: when entering a car in the Registry, if you are a Full Member always Log-In before making the entry. A logged-in Full Member can edit his/her entry. A non-logged in entry is not editable by the lister.
Once the VIN numbers were cleaned up, sorting the VIN column revealed some really useless information about the cars listed and, due to my generous nature, I want to share this with you.
Of the Cars in the Registry:
37% are 230SL (157 of 430 cars listed)
13% are 250SL (54)
49% are 280SL (211)
230SL transmission details:
LHD Manual code 10: 59% (92 of 157)
RHD Manual code 20: >1% (4)
LHD Auto code 12: 26% (41)
RHD Auto code 22: >1% (6)
250SL transmission details:
LHD Manual code 10: 47% (21 of 45)
RHD Manual code 20: 0 % (0)
LHD Auto code 12: 51% (23)
RHD Auto code 22: >1% (2)
280SL transmission details:
LHD Manual code 10: 30% (61 of 202)
RHD Manual code 20: >1 % (4)
LHD Auto code 12: 64% (130)
RHD Auto code 22: >1% (5)
Number of each Model in the Registry by Year of Registration (not year of manufacture):
230 SL:
1963 13 (of 159 cars) 8%
1964 40 cars 25%
1965 36 cars 23%
1966 52 cars 33%
1967 18 cars 11%
250 SL:
1967 54 (of 54 cars) 100%
280SL:
1968 56 (of 229 cars) 24%
1969 72 cars 31%
1970 51 cars 22%
1971 50 cars 22%
Some comments by a non-statistician:
A total of 48,912 W113 cars were produced; of these 41% (19,831) were 230 SL’s, 11% (5,196) were 250 SL’s and 49% (23,885) were 280 SL’s. Our proportion of ownership of each Model is consistent with these total production percentages.
Verifying what we already knew, among the cars in the Registry: 230 SL’s have a greater percentage of Manual transmissions (60% manual to 25% automatic), the 250’s are about 50/50; while the 280 SL’s are biased toward automatic transmissions (30% manual to 65% automatic).
The Car Registry also indicates that about 10% of the cars listed in the Registry are EURO models. This includes cars in the Registry that are located in North America as well as cars outside North America. This 10% figure does not tell us the proportion of cars produced that were EURO version cars. It only indicates that when viewing a gathering of W113’s at an event or show in North America, we can expect that fewer than 1 in 10 cars is likely to be a EURO version.
Comments are welcome if you are still awake.
)
Richard M, NYC
http://www.sl113.org/data/carreg/show_table.asp 
