walker111 wrote:Ken, can you give your educated guess on this?
All this is, is a guess, along with some assumptions based on outside information. Don't like it? Make your own guess.
We start out with 3850 cars sold in the States.
I'll exclude from the analysis the small number of cars that are imported/exported legally (JDM cars brought in, Canadians buying USM cars in the States, Americans buying CM cars in Canada).
What can happen to a car to cause it to disappear?
- It can be stolen. However, some of those cars are recovered. Some of those cars may have the parts sold, but the shell may be rebuilt. So either way, some of the stolen cars may reappear. Others may be totally parted out, and still others may be shipped overseas, so those are cars that disappear (within the States, anyway).
- It can be crashed and totalled. (You can include other sources of damage, e.g. flood, in this category.) Again, some of those cars are rebuilt with a salvage title (and some even get their titles washed somehow), so they reappear. Others may get parts sold and what's left either sits in a junkyard or gets crushed - in either case, those are cars that disappear, too.
Press reports on the cars that are most often stolen (the
latest report shows the 1999 Integra, which doesn't include any Type R's) says that 1 out of 200 cars are stolen in a year. Let's say, just for argument's sake, that the theft rate for ITRs is four times as high. That would be 1 out of 50 cars stolen in a year (2 percent).
I have no idea how many cars get totalled in crashes. I'll guess another 2 percent per year. Again, just a guess.
That makes for 96 percent of the cars that don't get stolen or totalled in any given year. If you take that percentage and crank the original numbers in a spreadsheet based on model year, you'll find that of the 3,850 cars originally sold, 2,963 of them are around and have never been stolen or totalled.
As far as the other 887 cars, you'll have to decide how you want to count them. How many of the stolen ones are still around, with theft titles? How many of the crashed ones are still around, with salvage titles? How many of those titles have been washed? Are we counting only cars with clean titles, and if so, does that include the washed titles? Or are we counting all cars still around?
If you assume that one fourth of the stolen cars and three fourths of the crashed cars are recovered and rebuilt, you then have 2,963 cars with legitimate clean titles and another 443 cars with branded titles (or washed titles).
Again, this is just a guess, based on the assumptions noted here. Make your own assumptions, plug in the numbers, and you can come up with your own guess.
