Actual number of DeLoreans left in USA and map of where they are (according to reg)

[tyb323]

Hey gang. So over the past semester, my roommate who is a geography major has been working with the chronology/registry created by Lazabby and has mapped out where they are (roughly)
The catch is, in some areas where there are more than one car per city, you can't tell, as the dots lay on top of each other.



http://i40.tinypic.com/27zus6.png

In response to the old thread about how many DeLoreans are left (time for some "expert" opinions), he tallied up 6,731 cars in the USA on the registry. Now some have been wrecked in that time, but since this is only the US and there are several more overseas, I feel confident now saying there are over 7,000 left.

[Sidaries]

Wow, that's a lot! Nice job.

[vwdmc16]

Nice. the Montana owners club must be boring.


whats the red dot in eastern Delaware?

[Mike C.]

That big blob in Illinois must be Rich W. :biggrin:

[jmettee]

Nice. the Montana owners club must be boring.


whats the red dot in eastern Delaware?

That Spaghetti-O is Tyler and is just south of DE...in MD. :hihi:

[Rhsxo]

I'm surprised that their are so many on the East Coast.

[Kevin]

I'm surprised that their are so many on the East Coast.

Hint to DMC: Open a DMC East!

Thanks for posting this, Tyler. It might be cool some day to maintain these on a Google map.

[protodelorean]

Wow. Looks like more the central Maryland/DC area than I thought.

Nice work!

Hey! Here's a challenge: Can your friend's software calculate the "central point" based on average distance to each data point? It'd be a great place for a future DCS. (Though, it looks like Ken was in a pretty good spot being in Ohio.)

[Kenny_Z]

I see me! :elmo1:

That reminds me of something I did with Thinkgeek awhile back on Maphook.com. There are entries based on geography and you can tag your own location or where ever you want with a picture and description.

[Notifier]

I don't see me! :frown: But then again my car was just updated on the last revision a couple of weeks ago. Although I love the idea. Really gives one a sense of where the cars are.

Suggestion for the problem of too many vehicles under one "dot". Color coding! Black=1, blue=2, green=3, etc.

Would also be cool to make the map interactive like Kenny_Z said. Something like hovering the mouse over the dot tells you vin, location, and such.

+1 on the DMC East location!

[DMCVegas]

Something else to consider is the fact that there are still a great number of DeLorean owners who are NOT on the internet, and have never contributed to this list. A significant number of this MIA owners, but by all means not exhaustive, might be found using the DOA's old list. But still, not even that might be up to date. As an example, my old mechanic in Vegas personally serviced about 30 local cars, but the most we ever saw online at once was maybe 5-7. When I interacted with a couple of stray owners I found in the wild, both of them refused to have any sort of online communications at all for various personal reasons. I don't know if any of the vendors might chime in on this about how many "Non-Registered" customers they have who are not on any current lists, but I'm sure there are still more cars out there that are unaccounted for.

[tyb323]

Hey guys. Unfortuntately, he can only do things like vin lookups and whatnot using the specific geography programs. If he has to make a website for a project in the future, maybe he can do it then and make the color modifications. He wanted to do that in the first place, but the time constraints of the semester and massive amount of time it took to build the map itself in the first place without the DeLoreans took time. I will be sure to update you all if he makes any modifications.

[sdg3205]

any interest in doing one for Canada, Tyler?

Would be much quicker!

[DMCTek]

Hint to DMC: Open a DMC East!

Thanks for posting this, Tyler. It might be cool some day to maintain these on a Google map.

Until then we can are happy to serve the east coast and offer enclosed transport.

Great info! Thanks for the hard work!

[SoCalDMC12]

In response to the old thread about how many DeLoreans are left (time for some "expert" opinions), he tallied up 6,731 cars in the USA on the registry. Now some have been wrecked in that time, but since this is only the US and there are several more overseas, I feel confident now saying there are over 7,000 left.

This is really neat.

A question: My understanding was that the registry that was referenced used the factory's original distribution information, was updated as owners registered new locations, but didn't account for cars taken out of service. So wouldn't this mean that the map shows an updated distribution of cars (owned by registered users), but not an updated number of cars still in existence?

Either way, it's still pretty interesting to see where the high concentrations of cars occur.

[DMC3165]

Way to go Tyler. Tell your colleague he did excellent work on the map. Interesting how so many D's are in the Mid-lantic region. Guess all the cool kids live in this neck of the woods. (jk of course)

[dvonk]

oh Nebraska... :mecry:

eventually there will be one additional circle on there, though :biggrin:

[Farrar]

Amazing that there are so many in my state and yet my "group" of Louisiana owners consists of only 5.

Farrar

[eagle-co94]

It's too bad the data probably isn't there to provide separate maps as GIS overlays, one with registered and running cars, one with inoperable status (found in barns, fields, etc) and another with parts-car status.

[DeLorean]

I had updated my location about 3 months ago. Also, many of those locations are nothing more than the original dealership they were sold at. Previous to my updating, My VIN listed the same city as it has as the point of delivery on the window sticker (which I have). The car had not been registered since 1991 before I got it. Very likely, many that list a location are in-fact, long long gone.

[lazabby]

Cool map. Thanks for posting it.

[DMCH James]

If this data was taken from the "VIN Chronology" rather than the "DeLorean Owners Directory" or DOD, then using this to determine the number of cars in existence is flawed.

The VIN Chronology includes a very large number of car data was taken from original DMC company sales records, and does not accurately reflect the number of cars still in existence.

The DOD is only marginally better, as it only includes cars that have been reported by their owners to a (basically) internet-only repository of data.

Tyler, can you clarify the data that used?

James

[tyb323]

He used the list from http://www.txdmc.org/, since it was in an html format his program could read.

[lazabby]

He used the data from the VIN chronology which has the last known location of the car. But you are right James, much of that data come from original sales records from 30 years ago. Hopefully, the VIN chronology has most of the DOD information incoporated in it.

Overall though, I think the map is reflective of where the cars are concentrated.

[DMCH James]

He used the data from the VIN chronology which has the last known location of the car. But you are right James, much of that data come from original sales records from 30 years ago. Hopefully, the VIN chronology has most of the DOD information incoporated in it.

Overall though, I think the map is reflective of where the cars are concentrated.

How many cars are listed in the DOD vs the DPC?

I appreciate the time and effort that has gone into this undertaking, but don't think it's an accurate reflection at all of either the number of cars remaining in existence or where they are located now since the data used is known to be from two, separate, in some cases as much as 30 year old data streams.

If it was as simple as plugging in a list of zip codes and having a map generated, I think the DMC dealers would be willing to provide a "zip code only" list of customers for this purpose, but even that would be only partially accurate unless it included all the DeLorean-specific entities. However, even that may not differentiate between "current owners", "past owners" and "enthusiasts".

Again, I can appreciate the time and effort that has gone into this undertaking but I'd rather have NO information than mis-information, which is the outcome we have now.

James

[tgraham]

FWIW, I have a (hastily-written) script that is converting those VIN/City/State/Country records on dmctx.org's website into a KML file so the locations can be easily plotted in Google Maps... it's running now, but it'll take a while because I'm sleeping the script in between queries to Google for reverse-geocoding (otherwise it just doesn't return the coordinates). I'll report back tonight if it all worked out.


If it was as simple as plugging in a list of zip codes and having a map generated, I think the DMC dealers would be willing to provide a "zip code only" list of customers for this purpose, but even that would be only partially accurate unless it included all the DeLorean-specific entities

This should be simple enough to do using the same process, if you're interested. This would be a lot more accurate (geographically speaking) than just the city/state data that I'm using.

Didn't someone do this already? This seems awfully familiar...

Travis

[tgraham]

After a little hiccup, it finished! Here's a version of some data (the same data?) that displays annotations on a Google map:
http://www.noroads.com/delorean/maps/dotregistry/

(Give it a moment to load)

And here is the map's KML file for use in Google Earth or elsewhere:
http://www.noroads.com/delorean/maps/dotregistry/locations.kml


Legend:
Blue = 1981
Green = 1982
Red = 1983
Yellow Flag = the calculated geographical center

(This is not very colorblind-friendly, I know... I just grabbed some basic stock images)


Data source & geocoding method:
I parsed the txdmc.org site's VIN registry (thanks!), then used Google Maps' geocoding API to convert the city/state/province/borough into geographical coordinates (this obviously introduces some error). Also, pins overlap for vehicles in the same location (in Google Maps, at least. Google Earth will split them out for you). There are still a few coordinates that are wrong and a lucky thirteen that simply got rejected, but I think it's mostly-correct. There should be 6430 records.


Other notes:
There is a LOT more that can be done with this than what I've done, in terms of both presentation and analysis. The regions should definitely be separated as layers, then geographical centers calculated from those, etc. This was a quick hack.


My program that created that KML file also calculated (without guarantee!) the geographical center of all of the data points... it's just north of Iowa City, IA, USA. There is/was a car pretty close by...

Enjoy,
Travis

[Chris Mays]

After a little hiccup, it finished! Here's a version of some data (the same data?) that displays annotations on a Google map:
http://www.noroads.com/delorean/maps/dotregistry/

(Give it a moment to load)

And here is the map's KML file for use in Google Earth or elsewhere:
http://www.noroads.com/delorean/maps/dotregistry/locations.kml


Legend:
Blue = 1981
Green = 1982
Red = 1983
Yellow Flag = the calculated geographical center

(This is not very colorblind-friendly, I know... I just grabbed some basic stock images)


Data source & geocoding method:
I parsed the txdmc.org site's VIN registry (thanks!), then used Google Maps' geocoding API to convert the city/state/province/borough into geographical coordinates (this obviously introduces some error). Also, pins overlap for vehicles in the same location (in Google Maps, at least. Google Earth will split them out for you). There are still a few coordinates that are wrong and a lucky thirteen that simply got rejected, but I think it's mostly-correct. There should be 6430 records.


Other notes:
There is a LOT more that can be done with this than what I've done, in terms of both presentation and analysis. The regions should definitely be separated as layers, then geographical centers calculated from those, etc. This was a quick hack.


My program that created that KML file also calculated (without guarantee!) the geographical center of all of the data points... it's just north of Iowa City, IA, USA. There is/was a car pretty close by...

Enjoy,
Travis

I recently got Vin 10439 from my dad in Ohio. It hasn't been registered in 16 years because it has been in his garage. I'm now the proud owner of Vin 10439 and i live in Springfield MO zip 65810

[Kevin]

After a little hiccup, it finished! Here's a version of some data (the same data?) that displays annotations on a Google map:
http://www.noroads.com/delorean/maps/dotregistry/

Thanks, Travis! Very cool, you did exactly what I was planning on doing. It's interesting to see the outliers overseas, like the ones in Singapore, Turkey and Russia. Was surprised to see lots of DeLoreans in Hawaii too.

[qwerk]

I see that when I get my DeLorean we can have a little 6 car Fox Valley DeLorean Car Club ;)

I've always thought there should be an informal Wisconsin club, but anyway...

Really neat stuff guys! Glad you took the time to do this. I'll definitely have to check it out in Google Earth when I get a chance.

[Mike C.]

I must be one of the unlucky ones, because my 83 doesn't show up.

[tgraham]

I must be one of the unlucky ones, because my 83 doesn't show up.

#16336 is in the KML file and it's displaying in Google Earth. There are multiple VINs in the exact location assigned to #16336 (hence the problem I mentioned earlier with geocoding from a city). Google Maps will only display the first VIN for any location - the subsequent entries are hidden beneath the first marker.

You'll have to use Google Earth (or something else that can read KML markup), which will show multiple entries for the same marker/location.

My VINs don't show up under GM either - and I'm unaware of the other owner (though, did check that these were in the txdmc.org registry... they were).

Travis

[Mike C.]

Gotcha! Thanks for the info. Im installing GE right now.

[Karin]

I am surprised there is only a handful in Houston and it's there that new cars are being made.

Now all we need is a neat little radar or indicator, telling us if we're getting close to a DeLorean. That was my thought shortly after I thought I saw one a couple weeks ago. May not be as fun as the mind going nuts over the sudden view of one passing by. But let's keep this a secret between us. Did I say that out loud? :rofl:

[thirdmanj]

I am surprised there is only a handful in Houston and it's there that new cars are being made.

Eh?


... And heeeeere we GO!!!



Just kidding, don't do it. Let it be ok?

[Karin]

The 57 thousand beans DeLoreans. :thumbup2: That's what I meant for the new cars.

[Delorean Industries]

I for one think it is great that owners are hunting down the population. Keep up the good work. Keep in mind it will never be a perfect number. There will always be another one out there and we will never actually know for sure. You are easily shy about 45-50 cars around my area for instance.

[qwerk]

Here's an idea. Since the data is constantly changing and (as people have noted) much of the data is based off of 30-year-old dealer records, what might be interesting is to color code the tags by age. Recently added (last year or two) could be green, original dealer records could be red, etc. This way you could easily tell which locations are likely to be correct and which are likely to have changed.

Not sure if the data includes time updated, which would obviously kinda kill the whole idea, but at the very least dealer records could be "flagged," since I would guess most of that is no longer correct.

[ccurzio]

Here's an idea. Since the data is constantly changing and (as people have noted) much of the data is based off of 30-year-old dealer records, what might be interesting is to color code the tags by age. Recently added (last year or two) could be green, original dealer records could be red, etc. This way you could easily tell which locations are likely to be correct and which are likely to have changed.

Not sure if the data includes time updated, which would obviously kinda kill the whole idea, but at the very least dealer records could be "flagged," since I would guess most of that is no longer correct.

Can't wait to see the full-on Google Maps implementation.

[Citizen]

... Hopefully, the VIN chronology has most of the DOD information incoporated in it.


For location reporting purposes on the Texas web site, yes, it does. The .pdf file available for download does not, as this is just the starting list prior to the DOD updates.




How many cars are listed in the DOD vs the DPC?


Total VINs in Registry: 8574
DOD (active): 1154
DOD (inactive): 301