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That's a very colorful and unique 1952 Packard 200 advertisement under the "recent photos" column and it has an interesting statement in the white oval located in the bottom left hand corner. It says "more than 53% of all Packards built since 1899 are still in use". I'm curious to know how Packard officials would have determined that 53% of the cars they built in the last 53 years were still being used in 1952? That's an impressive percentage for that time and I would love to know how many are still being used today...60 years after that statement was made and 56 years after the last "Packard" built car left the factory.

I've read elsewhere that the source of the statistic was state motor vehicle records.

We've speculated many times before about how many are left today, and how many are actually "in use" or roadworthy. The numbers most often presented and agreed to by those with a good feel for this are in the range of 12-15,000 and about 7000 respectively, out of a total production of about 1.6 million. If you take those in the PAC and assume they are all on the road (questionable), add those in CCCA not in PAC, ditto for PI and VMCCA and HCCA, you get about 7000, give or take. The current PAC directory totals just over 6000.

In light of the recent story of the gentleman who had all the Packards stored vertically during the war and which barely escaped the scrap drives, it is even more amazing that so many could survive unscathed. No tires, little gas or anything else auto wise to keep them going must have meant lots were put up on blocks and hidden away to keep them out of the drives.

Wow, I didn't catch that story HH. Do you have a link to it? 7000 out of 1.6 million seems like so few cars have survived...isn't that like around 4/10ths of a percent? I guess the war effort did claim a lot of car lives not to mention human life...

Perhaps someone else can help. I can't remember the gentlemans name at the moment. In the last month or two there were several newspaper clippings posted on site with the story and that of a subsequent fire which destroyed a lot of his collection.

Read "how many Cars have tires". It looks like Packard did keep up with how many were on the road. I would assume that that they then also kept up with how many we're produced as well.

packardinfo.com/xoops/html/downloads/SC/SL-VOL16NO10.pdf

Quote:Howard,

Were you referring to this story about Barney Pollard?

That's the one Mal. Could not remember his name at all.

It's crap. They used that number back in the 30's too.
I suppose that if you obtained motor vehicle registration data for a given area and extrapolated the sample you could come up with an estimate. You could do it for a single dealer and call that 53%.

Here is one of my favorites:

"Performance? You don't know the meaning of the word until you drive this new Buick" 1958

I guess the only way to get a somewhat accurate number would be to go to each state and to their agency that administers vehicle registration. Then, searching the records, sort out and count the Packards, and order them by year. This would be an interesting, but time consuming exercise. I am not volunteering.

(o[]o)