How many left?

Last weeks article about the Ford Orion stirred up a few memories for me. I had a 1.6 Ghia version and I have to say, it was a very nice car. But it made me think, I haven’t seen one for ages. As someone who attends a lot of classic car events I honestly can’t recall seeing one since they became classics.

So where are they all? I jumped down the rabbit hole that is the Internet to try and find out.

Before you join me down this rabbit hole a word of warning. The data is supplied by the DVLA and third party agencies interrogate and publish the data. It is famously inaccurate and confusing to use. For example the company might divide a model into all the special sub categories including special editions. So to understand how many Ford Orions there are, you might have to add up 20 or 30 model variants.

To make our story as accurate as possible we have used three web sites and tried to come up with a reasonable figure based on all three sites.

So back to the Orion. It seems that there are 1 694 Ford Orions still around. This seems a lot but, 1 445 are Sorn leaving just 244 on the road. In the case of the Ghia variant just 8 are still driving around. You are more likely to see a Ferrari 308 (203 cars) than a Ford Orion Ghia.

The site, howrareismycar.com also has a section of charts which tell an interesting story. The most popular classic car (40+ years old) is the Morris Minor with about 1762 car on the road, of which 105 are travellers. These figures seem far too low, but it seems reasonable the Morris Minor would be the most popular cars over 40 years of age.

The most popular car from 1970’s registrations is the MGB and the most popular car of the 1980’s and the 1990’s was the Land Rover Defender.

It is an interesting area and you should explore the data yourselves, with the caveats about accuracy and structure. Try the following sites to get you going:-