How many makes & models of automobile, current & antique, are driving on America’s highways & byways?
um…all of them?
Well, my edition of Georgano’s complete encyclopedia of motorcars (2nd edition, 1973. Latest edition is the third, 1982) lists 473 makes, most of them extinct and many probably have no surviving examples. But that does set a sort of upper limit of maybe 200(?) extant makes, even counting orphans still on the road. After all, there are still driveable Dusenbergs around, even if the newest is 80 years old. I would venture a guess that not including unique examples, which don’t see much if any road time, you would still be looking at over 100. If I look at makes, I can come up with about 90 current or recently departed (Pontiac, Saturn, Mercury, Plymouth, etc) makes. If each one has several models extant, it would be fairly simple to come up with around a thousand makes and models. I take make to mean Buick/Cadillac/Olds as makes, and Century/Villager/Corolla/Silver Spur/Beetle as models. I would count Corvair as one model, not 700/900/Monza as three.
Any thoughts, anybody. I realize this is VERY rough, but it’s a start.
Mixdenny ninja’d me. However, some of those makes are fictional, and many are not on the road except in movies. You would never see them on the road. The OP was makes and models on the road today.
It is a rather interesting list, though. I would never have guessed that many Buicks in movies.
So, we seem to be off on a good SDMB start…
I’m with you on the makes.
I think the only way to really attack the question would be to use registration data from every state.
I did a marketing project for a car repair business where part of the job was to list all the makes they had worked on or could work on. It wasn’t entirely accurate because I had to pick and choose.
I started by compiling a list of cars being sold or manufactured in the US but left out small American manufacturers like Rezvani and Lurca and most of the others. They could have worked on those but it’s highly unlikely one would come around, and no one knows those names anyway. But I left in a couple like Fisker, as I considered them to be common enough that they might work on one (and more importantly, people might recognize the name). I ignored all small foreign manufacturers that nobody has ever heard of.
Then I had to decide whether tuning shops like Shelby and Alpina were makes of cars or not. I decided they weren’t although they had worked on those.
Then came the defunct car manufacturers. I left in some defunct makes like Daewoo, and Eagle as they had worked on those in recent years, but I left out many others as there are huge lists of defunct American car makers and certainly even longer lists of foreign makers. I tried to limit it to cars people still drove, so Geos stayed but Studebakers didn’t. I left out all antiques like the Studebaker.
The end result was 66 makes of cars that I considered common enough that a repair shop might run into them. Common enough that people drive them to work or common enough that you might see one, like Bentlys. But I still left out a lot.
Knowing what I included and left out, I would hazard a guess that a trucker driving around the country and writing down what they saw could easily come up with a list of 100 makes of vehicles on the road. That includes all the mass produced Hondas, Chevys, Ferraris and common defunct cars like AMC, Geo, and Checker cabs, the rare supercar like Koenigsegg and McLaren, and a sprinkling of antiques on the way to the car show.
But that’s not exhaustive. There are rare new cars you never see like the Falcon and BXR. There are the odd race cars that somehow become street legal. There are kit cars and homebuilt stuff. There are the rare foreign cars that were never sold here but someone has in their garage and they drive once a year. There are ATVs that are street legal in some states.
But the antiques are the real problem. How many Stout Scarabs are out there? Are they all in museums or does that one guy that drives one to the car shows count? How many REOs, Kissels, Biddles and Apollos? How many Elmores? And finally, the age old question we’ve all asked before; How many Dorts?
Well… that can depend on which of his cars Jay Leno is driving today…
The more appropriate list is their main list: http://www.imcdb.org/
This has 226 makes. Reading through I eliminated at least 96 as being highly unlikely or a truck or motorcycle manufacturer. Lots of the odd ones come from Asian or east European films.
So about 120 makes. But models, man! Each of those makes has dozens of models at least. Click on Chevrolet, there are hundreds of models. Yes, most are commercial vehicles, antiques and what not, it still leaves a hell of a lot of models. I counted 77 I could ID myself if I saw one, and I just counted all the dozens of C-10, 20, 30 truck models as one.
Did you know there was a Chevrolet Mercury? It appeared in 5 different movies, all filmed in 1933. Great product placement but it certainly didn’t lead anywhere.
So 120 makes and say 15 models average, 1800 models on the roads is a conservative guess. Could be lots higher.
I’m an enthusiast and read lots of forums for old cars and I see things daily I have never heard of before.
Dennis
Some in that list are motorcycles, too. E.g., Cagiva.
To be fair, 1933 was an especially sucky year for new car sales. Especially for cars aimed at what we’d later call “the Middle Class”.
Shelby isn’t just a tuning shop. It builds vehicles from scratch (basically updated Cobra replicas) as well.
The German TUV recognizes Alpina as a manufacturer in its own right, too (though it doesn’t build anything other than BMW variants).
Alpina has been building their BMW variants for decades. It was cool to finally see one in ‘the wild’ (not at the races or at shows) for the first time 3 weeks ago when I spotted a BMW Alpina B6 in San Francisco.
There’s a B7 in my office parking garage. They’re not as cool as they used to be now that there is an M version of everything, though.
I see a few on occasion as I drive through a cluster of wealthy suburbs just west of where I live. It’s how I first heard of Alpina – I saw what looked like a BMW, but with a different maker badge on it, and looked it up when I got home.
It’s also a good area for seeing Maseratis, Ferraris, and the occasional Lamborghini. 
My list is nothing if not subjective
You’ve named off more makes that I have never heard of than I might even know. What the hell is a Dort? Rhetorical Q. But I have seen more Studebakers driven around here (San Francisco to Silicon Valley area) than Alpinas, certainly.
Not a perfect answer but this website lists parts for cars in junkyards. They have a dropdown box that seems to try to list every make and model of car in their members’ inventories.
My rough estimate is that there are about 1500 models on that list but it’s imperfect. There are no Dorts but there is a Renault Gordini. They list Ferrari as a manufacturer but not its individual models. It doesn’t list the Japan-only Honda Beat even though I saw one on the road a few years ago. I’m guessing it covers close to half of the models even if it excludes more than half of the really obscure manufacturers. So, my guess is that there are perhaps 3000 or so car models on U.S. streets, not including one-offs.
URL? Sounds interesting.
Dennis
I can’t believe I forgot the link. www.car-part.com. The drop down works on my desktop but the mobile site has a different interface that doesn’t show all the models in a single list.