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Originally Posted by jbgordon,Sep 11 2009, 08:03 AM
'02 and '03 were the only years that all red interior was offered. In '02 it was the silvers, white and black, and '03 it was just the silvers.
Based on this post it looks like all red interior was for 02 and 03. So all the MY00 GPW / Red vehicles were red/black interior. The ownerlink website probably lists it as "Red" instead of "Red/Black" because the all red interior didn't exist yet and there was no reason to differentiate.
There might be. I don't know how other countries handle their VIN-equivalents. And even if I did, I don't know if there is a honda ownerlink equivalent site for those VIN-equivalents. If those things exist, than it could be done.
Okay, there's at least a Canadian site: http://www.myhonda.ca
Requires a VIN, last name, and postal code to register. Can someone in Canada register and see if, given a valid vin (even if it's not your own) will result in telling the year/color?
Originally Posted by patinum,Sep 16 2009, 01:28 PM
Okay, there's at least a Canadian site: http://www.myhonda.ca
Requires a VIN, last name, and postal code to register. Can someone in Canada register and see if, given a valid vin (even if it's not your own) will result in telling the year/color?
Try posting on the Canada forum and see if you get any bites.
patinum, this is a very nice piece of detective work.
It's interesting to compare Honda's official U.S. sales/registration statistics through August (note - the AP1/AP2 count was mine).
The main difference is that the production numbers imply there are about 500 cars not accounted for by Honda's sales statistics (66,860 vs. 66,360). Note: these 500 are not the "missing" VINs you discovered -- they're production VINs that your 'bot dug up and counted, but appear never to have been sold to the public. However, these are not just unsold inventory from the '08-'09 models. Yes, it's been a brutal couple years for the S, but I don't think there are anywhere near 500 '08-'09 S2000s languishing on dealer lots. As we'll see below, I suspect these extras were, in fact, AP1s.
Using October thru September as the effective "model year" for selling, here's how production and sales lined up:
Clearly in some years production lagged demand (negative number of "excess" cars) and in others it exceeded it. Here's how I read the numbers:
From MY00-03, it appears that Honda aimed for a few hundred extras each year, then under-produced as AP1 production wound down to let the supply run out. Overall AP1 production exceeded sales by about 1,100 cars. For MY04, Honda was just able to meet initial demand for the AP2, but then found themselves drastically over-producing for MY05, so they cut back severely on the MY06's; things were back to normal for MY07.
Now here's where it gets interesting. While you (and I) might have assumed that MY08-09 production would have far exceeded demand due to the drastic sales drop caused by the recession, it appears Honda was way ahead of us. In fact, production began lagging even during MY08. Is this a sign that, despite the announcement in Jan '09, Honda had actually decided early in 2008 to kill the S2000?? (Cue the conspiracy theorists!)
On a final note, I doubt there have been only 355 MY09s produced. patinum, I'd encourage you to keep updating your numbers for '08-'09 through about the end of this calendar year. If there are any VINs that haven't yet made it into the Ownerlink system, they should be there by then.
but I don't think there are anywhere near 500 '08-'09 S2000s languishing on dealer lots. As we'll see below, I suspect these extras were, in fact, AP1s.
