2000/2002 Tourings – How

2000/2002 TOURINGS

- HOW MANY ARE LEFT? By James Hobson

Firstly, I would like to wish all my BMW colleagues well and trust you and your families are well and safe from Covid-19.

Secondly, as a Touring owner I was interested to know how many Tourings were still on the road. I did write a small piece in our monthly magazine way back in 2018 to say that I was on a mission to establish how many Tourings are left in the UK. Having had many conversations with various people from the Touring world the figures varied from 6 to 200! Also, some of the data from the online companies is incorrect and people quote these figures which are totally inaccurate.

Although the mentioned figures were genuine responses, I was not really reassured by this so in February 2019 I embarked on a mission to find out how many are left.

I initially wrote to the DVLA asking the question and they kindly wrote back saying some years ago they outsourced all enquiries on car data to six different companies. Out of those six companies I contacted, only two were interested in helping me on my mission. The big problem was they wanted to be paid for this information, and I do understand that they are companies who wish to make a

profit and someone like me is not doing them any favours.

At least there was one company called Carweb Ltd who were extremely helpful in providing me with the information I wanted at no cost, so a big thank you to them!

Carweb started in 2004, at which point they had all the DVLA data on every car in the UK transferred to them in a bulk file. The data they received was based on the information garages and individual people had sent to the DVLA, but Carweb and the DVLA know the figures are not completely accurate. Some vehicles would have been scrapped or exported without informing the DVLA prior to 2004. Therefore, we can only work with the figures provided.

In March 2019 Carweb said they could provide me with the data but if I waited until June, they would be getting a refresh of data from the DVLA and that would be more up to date. True to their word, that data arrived at the end of June. That new data in June 2019 shows: • 151 Tourings, of which, • 19 have been scrapped and 2 of these have been scrapped with a certificate of destruction. The rest were mostly scrapped before 2007, when this certification process came into being. • 13 have been exported (with thanks to Dave Burnett in Australia we know of 3 Tourings there) • 62 are current vehicles (37 taxed as historic and 25 on SORN) • 57 unaccounted for and have not been officially scrapped or exported and can be attributed to the following list: • Scrapped but not notified • Exported but not notified • Sitting in storage or abandoned somewhere or used as donor vehicles, not SORNed or taxed for many years

There will also be a handful of Tourings missing because DVLA had not identified some cars when they were transferring the information from the original log books to the current V5C registration document.

So what can we conclude?

The DVLA data is not totally accurate, but we knew it would be impossible to obtain from the early 1970s because not all of the cars are listed as Tourings. Some cars are recorded as having body names called Coupe, Estate, Saloon and funnily enough my car is the only car listed as a 3-Door Hatchback.

We can say the DVLA have live data on 62 Tourings of which 25 of these are on SORN. Therefore, I think you can say with some accuracy there are about 37 Tourings on the road. It is interesting as we know 1,876 RHD Tourings were made for 2 years and 8 months from September 1971 to April 1974. There were two models of the Touring made, 1,537 of Model 71 from September 1971 to August 1973, and then 339 of Model 73 from August 1973 to April 1974.

Unfortunately, as the DVLA had never been given the model type at registration they never got recorded separately so the two models cannot be identified. Therefore, we shall never know how many models are left in each model range.

My car is a Model 73 and I will say when chatting to other enthusiasts and friends my car is one of the 37 on the road in the UK.