- Wed Jun 17, 2015 9:39 am
#3833622
So you know that guy, the one on facebook who knows exactly how many there are of one particular car in the UK? His mate Dave told him,
and his brother works for a tuning company and they know. You might just take that figure as boring fact or entertaining fiction and move on with your life. That's the sensible thing to do, and if you are that person you can stop reading right about....now.
Because this is a guide all about my very own personal fact finding quest to get to the bottom of the age old online argument or made up seller statement of 'only a handful on the road' or 'a very rare car in the UK'. I'm not disputing that some cars are rarer than others. I would just like to know what lengths someone would have to go to to be absolutely certain of that figure they so casually seemed to pluck from the air like it was common knowledge, and actually mate how did you not know that it's so obvious. And as it turns out, you do have to go to some lengths, as will be divulged over the following paragraphs and pages.
I feel like I have a small vested interest in separating the fact from fiction. I own a 2001 imported EP3. It's a special car. You might dismiss it as just being 'the same as a UK model but with white paint and a Limited Slip Differential, and that's about it'. You'd be wrong. They obviously haven't been sprinkled with JDM magic fairy dust on that long voyage from Swindon to Tokyo and back, but owning a real 'JDM' car (scene points yes!) that was also built in the UK is fairly unique, and makes for slightly amusing 30 second anecdote at car meets - which is totally worth the extra money I spent on her. Oh yes, and before you bemoan the ridiculous price tag that they command - I picked mine up for less than a decent Premier Edition, and you get what you pay for. I know people who rate it above the EK9 and DC5 and I am surprisingly also one of those people. You will disagree. That's fine. It's your opinion.
I am digressing slightly, but the JDM EP3 is something I rarely see - and I look constantly. I have never spotted another one on the road, and I have only ever seen 4 or 5 other examples at shows, and I go to a lot of shows! In fact the biggest Honda meet in Europe this year had just 2 examples, mine and one other. Also the two largest Civic Type R events in Europe (Spa 2014, Nurburgring 2015) featured just my lonely little white car as the sole EP3 import. I'm sure just around the corner from you there is a bloke who owns six of them. I haven't met him. He might not exist....
So anyway, now I have explained some of my motivation away i'll start getting down to brass tacks. How rare is your car, and how do you go finding that information out?
The first port of call should be https://www.howmanyleft.co.uk/ and with a quick search you can gleam some information that looks a bit like this:
30th Anniversary
From this we can determine that if you have a 30th Anniversary - you have a rare car. 286 were registered in total in the UK, and at the tail end of 2014 there were only 220 left (12 are SORN as the following graphic shows). Now we all know, or think we know that 300 of these cars were produced in 3 colours, which if true means that you are the very special owner of a car that only 99 other people in the world could have. I can't personally account for the 14 cars that were not registered in the UK. Officially the release from Honda was European, so it may be safe to assume that somewhere in Europe their are a dozen or so kicking about being driven on the wrong side of the road or sold as left hand drive, and maybe 2 were kept back by Honda as promo cars.
But let's go by the DVLA stats that this site refers to, as that is how many is on the road in this country right now. Factor in the amount that have been written off or broken for parts and our best estimate is the 220 stated, meaning you now own a car that statistically only another 73.3r people in the country own. That's pretty rare. Where it falls down slightly for me in the specialness stakes is that although this was a very exclusive release (200 less than the Civic Jordan remember) it is still essentially a re-branded normal EP3 with some trinkets added from the JDM production line in Swindon. Don't get me wrong though, I love a 30th Anni and you should be proud to own a piece of Honda History.
Mugen FN2
We can also see at the click of a mouse that the FN2 Mugen is quite a rare car to own. I don't have the official release figures from Honda at the time of writing, and a quick Google search yields no obvious results. What we do know is that the Mugen 20 was as the title suggests a production batch of 20 cars. The Mugen 200 was produced in bigger numbers, but as few as 184 were registered in the UK, and if the Mugen 20 makes up part of this stat - then maybe even fewer were made available to Joe Public. I do know that Honda UK has a Mugen FN2 kicking about which is registered to drive on UK roads.
The problem I have with this car is that it's a tuning company special edition rather than a straight up Honda model. Don't get me wrong, I am a huge Mugen fan, but when considering production releases as I am here the Mugen should really be excluded. The logic for me is that anyone could start up a tuning company, get pally with their Dad's motor corp. and produce one single car which would then be the rarest example of that model. Ok maybe not, but you get the point.
FN2
Registrations of this popular model peaked in 2009 with 8,038 examples on the road or SORN. This was of course the non-Japanese release of a Civic Type R (with the FD2 being the JDM product) , and there a large amount of left handers out on the continent as well. It was also available in parts of Asia and Australia, so the UK figure probably does little to reflect how many were sold globally. Not very rare at all, unless you consider the Championship White Edition of which a mere 523 examples have been UK registered. Not as rare as a 30th Anni by any stretch of the imagination, but still in a relatively exclusive group for UK owners.
What is more interesting is the other iterations listed as either CIVIC GT TYPE R I-VTEC (2,591) CIVIC TYPE-R I-VTEC (891 and 76) or CIVIC TYPE-R S-GR I-VTEC (3). I am of the opinion (with little fact to back it up) that perhaps there were 2 different trim levels in the GT and non-GT FN2 release, so if we are going to disregard this as making them different cars and combine the figures then the FN2 UK registration figure is actually well over 11,500. The interesting figure is the 3 CIVIC TYPE-R S-GR I-VTECs which have been registered. Fabled to be a light weight no frills version which apparently still had air-con. If you own one of these feel free to get in touch, i'd love to know how it differs from the standard car, and why only 3 were ever sold on our shores!
EP3
Now here is where it gets tricky! The obvious thing to do would be to look at the stat telling you that the EP3 peaked at 19,107 in 2005 and is steadily declining at the average rate of around 500 cars per year ever since. However - as the DVLA stats have been specific enough to give us 2 different trim levels on the FN2, and point out the fact that the Championship White Edition was a production model in it's own right - then where are the EK9s and FD2s? Well this really is the crux of the matter....
The DVLA do not, and have been told by the European Union (yeh I have no idea why either) not to differentiate cars which were registered after manufacturer release, and cars which were privately imported. Crazy, but true! This leaves us with a conundrum. If the lucky Civic EP3s that were given that special lick of Champ White paint, given a different engine, exhaust manifold, LSD, C-Pack and all that other JDM goodness are not treated as a separate model, then it stands to reason that CTR which predates the release of the FN2 has been lumped together in one category.
This might not be the case, but at first glance looks pretty likely. I own an import EP3 and I know what's on the V5 and what it is insured as, and it is treated by all as a box standard EP3 (usually a black one if I'm shopping online) when you could quite sensibly argue that it isn't. Not too far fetched that all older Civic Type R's have just been given this blanket term and incorporated into one figure.
One way of helping to determine this would be to ask Honda how many EP3s they sold in the UK, deduct that number from the figure listed and that should give us an estimate of the total number of Ek9s, JDM EP3s and FD2s there are in the UK. The problem with Honda (bless them) is that as a privately owned multinational corporation they are not bound by the same freedom of information requests as public state sponsored organisations that are also more well prepared fro phone calls from professional time wasters. So I contacted the DVLA.
DVLA
You can contact any government agency and ask them pretty much whatever you like, and if it has been deemed secure enough information to be in the public interest then they HAVE to tell you by law - which if you live in a totalitarian regime somewhere in the world, I have to tell you - it's fantastic. I'm not at all sure why the number of Honda Civics imported into the UK is in the public interest, but less than 24 hours after making the request online I received a phone call from a nice young man called David who wanted to help me out. Nice chap.
David reiterated the fact that the DVLA held no specific figures on private imports, and that they are treated the same as domestic cars upon registration. He pointed me in the direction of the officially released statistics which are available here: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistic ... stics-2014
I'll save you a lot of grief - after opening all 74 individual spreadsheets only 2 are of any use whatsoever. VEH0124 is the source of the information we found on howmanyleft.co.uk and more interestingly at this point VEH160 which lists the amount registered by which year since 2001. This could be useful information.
If we assume that since the Civic Type R EP3 finished production in 2006, or at least the last production cars were UK registered in 2006, then any cars being registered subsequent to that date must be imports. What we can determine is that from 2007 to the end of 2014 there were 402 Civic Type Rs registered. We know they aren't FN2s and we know they aren't all UKDM EP3s. This figure doesn't reflect cars imported pre-2007, and it doesn't differentiate between different chassis codes - still assuming that these are EK9s and FD2s as well which we can't rule out at this point.
and his brother works for a tuning company and they know. You might just take that figure as boring fact or entertaining fiction and move on with your life. That's the sensible thing to do, and if you are that person you can stop reading right about....now.
Because this is a guide all about my very own personal fact finding quest to get to the bottom of the age old online argument or made up seller statement of 'only a handful on the road' or 'a very rare car in the UK'. I'm not disputing that some cars are rarer than others. I would just like to know what lengths someone would have to go to to be absolutely certain of that figure they so casually seemed to pluck from the air like it was common knowledge, and actually mate how did you not know that it's so obvious. And as it turns out, you do have to go to some lengths, as will be divulged over the following paragraphs and pages.
I feel like I have a small vested interest in separating the fact from fiction. I own a 2001 imported EP3. It's a special car. You might dismiss it as just being 'the same as a UK model but with white paint and a Limited Slip Differential, and that's about it'. You'd be wrong. They obviously haven't been sprinkled with JDM magic fairy dust on that long voyage from Swindon to Tokyo and back, but owning a real 'JDM' car (scene points yes!) that was also built in the UK is fairly unique, and makes for slightly amusing 30 second anecdote at car meets - which is totally worth the extra money I spent on her. Oh yes, and before you bemoan the ridiculous price tag that they command - I picked mine up for less than a decent Premier Edition, and you get what you pay for. I know people who rate it above the EK9 and DC5 and I am surprisingly also one of those people. You will disagree. That's fine. It's your opinion.
I am digressing slightly, but the JDM EP3 is something I rarely see - and I look constantly. I have never spotted another one on the road, and I have only ever seen 4 or 5 other examples at shows, and I go to a lot of shows! In fact the biggest Honda meet in Europe this year had just 2 examples, mine and one other. Also the two largest Civic Type R events in Europe (Spa 2014, Nurburgring 2015) featured just my lonely little white car as the sole EP3 import. I'm sure just around the corner from you there is a bloke who owns six of them. I haven't met him. He might not exist....
So anyway, now I have explained some of my motivation away i'll start getting down to brass tacks. How rare is your car, and how do you go finding that information out?
The first port of call should be https://www.howmanyleft.co.uk/ and with a quick search you can gleam some information that looks a bit like this:
30th Anniversary
From this we can determine that if you have a 30th Anniversary - you have a rare car. 286 were registered in total in the UK, and at the tail end of 2014 there were only 220 left (12 are SORN as the following graphic shows). Now we all know, or think we know that 300 of these cars were produced in 3 colours, which if true means that you are the very special owner of a car that only 99 other people in the world could have. I can't personally account for the 14 cars that were not registered in the UK. Officially the release from Honda was European, so it may be safe to assume that somewhere in Europe their are a dozen or so kicking about being driven on the wrong side of the road or sold as left hand drive, and maybe 2 were kept back by Honda as promo cars.
But let's go by the DVLA stats that this site refers to, as that is how many is on the road in this country right now. Factor in the amount that have been written off or broken for parts and our best estimate is the 220 stated, meaning you now own a car that statistically only another 73.3r people in the country own. That's pretty rare. Where it falls down slightly for me in the specialness stakes is that although this was a very exclusive release (200 less than the Civic Jordan remember) it is still essentially a re-branded normal EP3 with some trinkets added from the JDM production line in Swindon. Don't get me wrong though, I love a 30th Anni and you should be proud to own a piece of Honda History.
Mugen FN2
We can also see at the click of a mouse that the FN2 Mugen is quite a rare car to own. I don't have the official release figures from Honda at the time of writing, and a quick Google search yields no obvious results. What we do know is that the Mugen 20 was as the title suggests a production batch of 20 cars. The Mugen 200 was produced in bigger numbers, but as few as 184 were registered in the UK, and if the Mugen 20 makes up part of this stat - then maybe even fewer were made available to Joe Public. I do know that Honda UK has a Mugen FN2 kicking about which is registered to drive on UK roads.
The problem I have with this car is that it's a tuning company special edition rather than a straight up Honda model. Don't get me wrong, I am a huge Mugen fan, but when considering production releases as I am here the Mugen should really be excluded. The logic for me is that anyone could start up a tuning company, get pally with their Dad's motor corp. and produce one single car which would then be the rarest example of that model. Ok maybe not, but you get the point.
FN2
Registrations of this popular model peaked in 2009 with 8,038 examples on the road or SORN. This was of course the non-Japanese release of a Civic Type R (with the FD2 being the JDM product) , and there a large amount of left handers out on the continent as well. It was also available in parts of Asia and Australia, so the UK figure probably does little to reflect how many were sold globally. Not very rare at all, unless you consider the Championship White Edition of which a mere 523 examples have been UK registered. Not as rare as a 30th Anni by any stretch of the imagination, but still in a relatively exclusive group for UK owners.
What is more interesting is the other iterations listed as either CIVIC GT TYPE R I-VTEC (2,591) CIVIC TYPE-R I-VTEC (891 and 76) or CIVIC TYPE-R S-GR I-VTEC (3). I am of the opinion (with little fact to back it up) that perhaps there were 2 different trim levels in the GT and non-GT FN2 release, so if we are going to disregard this as making them different cars and combine the figures then the FN2 UK registration figure is actually well over 11,500. The interesting figure is the 3 CIVIC TYPE-R S-GR I-VTECs which have been registered. Fabled to be a light weight no frills version which apparently still had air-con. If you own one of these feel free to get in touch, i'd love to know how it differs from the standard car, and why only 3 were ever sold on our shores!
EP3
Now here is where it gets tricky! The obvious thing to do would be to look at the stat telling you that the EP3 peaked at 19,107 in 2005 and is steadily declining at the average rate of around 500 cars per year ever since. However - as the DVLA stats have been specific enough to give us 2 different trim levels on the FN2, and point out the fact that the Championship White Edition was a production model in it's own right - then where are the EK9s and FD2s? Well this really is the crux of the matter....
The DVLA do not, and have been told by the European Union (yeh I have no idea why either) not to differentiate cars which were registered after manufacturer release, and cars which were privately imported. Crazy, but true! This leaves us with a conundrum. If the lucky Civic EP3s that were given that special lick of Champ White paint, given a different engine, exhaust manifold, LSD, C-Pack and all that other JDM goodness are not treated as a separate model, then it stands to reason that CTR which predates the release of the FN2 has been lumped together in one category.
This might not be the case, but at first glance looks pretty likely. I own an import EP3 and I know what's on the V5 and what it is insured as, and it is treated by all as a box standard EP3 (usually a black one if I'm shopping online) when you could quite sensibly argue that it isn't. Not too far fetched that all older Civic Type R's have just been given this blanket term and incorporated into one figure.
One way of helping to determine this would be to ask Honda how many EP3s they sold in the UK, deduct that number from the figure listed and that should give us an estimate of the total number of Ek9s, JDM EP3s and FD2s there are in the UK. The problem with Honda (bless them) is that as a privately owned multinational corporation they are not bound by the same freedom of information requests as public state sponsored organisations that are also more well prepared fro phone calls from professional time wasters. So I contacted the DVLA.
DVLA
You can contact any government agency and ask them pretty much whatever you like, and if it has been deemed secure enough information to be in the public interest then they HAVE to tell you by law - which if you live in a totalitarian regime somewhere in the world, I have to tell you - it's fantastic. I'm not at all sure why the number of Honda Civics imported into the UK is in the public interest, but less than 24 hours after making the request online I received a phone call from a nice young man called David who wanted to help me out. Nice chap.
David reiterated the fact that the DVLA held no specific figures on private imports, and that they are treated the same as domestic cars upon registration. He pointed me in the direction of the officially released statistics which are available here: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistic ... stics-2014
I'll save you a lot of grief - after opening all 74 individual spreadsheets only 2 are of any use whatsoever. VEH0124 is the source of the information we found on howmanyleft.co.uk and more interestingly at this point VEH160 which lists the amount registered by which year since 2001. This could be useful information.
If we assume that since the Civic Type R EP3 finished production in 2006, or at least the last production cars were UK registered in 2006, then any cars being registered subsequent to that date must be imports. What we can determine is that from 2007 to the end of 2014 there were 402 Civic Type Rs registered. We know they aren't FN2s and we know they aren't all UKDM EP3s. This figure doesn't reflect cars imported pre-2007, and it doesn't differentiate between different chassis codes - still assuming that these are EK9s and FD2s as well which we can't rule out at this point.
JDM EP3 - N/A - Mugen
