With the new edition of the DOD having been compiled, I have also had a chance to assemble an updated VIN list and production chronology. You can find the materials on the DMCNews web site at www.dmcnews.com/faq/n_chron.htm With this latest release, the production statistics that I computed for the available data probably regressed slightly and may not be as sound. The reason is that the statistical methods assume the data samples are uncorrelated (i.e. that all the VINs collected were collected at random and that this randomness results in a uniform sample density across the entire VIN space). Because the VIN list now includes a lot of data from some of the company records that have been discovered, the assumption of uncorrelated samples no longer holds. In many cases the company records cover a "batch" of sequential VINs, for example, and this results in the distribution not being uniform. This is especially the case since there are more records available for the '81 cars than for later cars. The VIN list now contains over 3500 cars in it. As usual there are several entries that have discrepancies (for example, the shipping manifest indicates it as a grey 5-speed but the DOD record for it indicates it's an automatic). Some of the entries with obvious discrepancies are marked in the list. Since the data largely comes from the DOD, it's best to correct discrepancies at the source by submitting corrections to the DOD where possible since corrections sent to me end up creating a subsequent discrepancy when the next DOD database is merged in. >From the materials collected thus far, the rarest build combination appears to be an '82 black automatic (with black '82 models overall being rare). As a whole, '83 automatics are also pretty rare. In September '81 the factory cranked out exclusively black cars, while in the following month they cranked out exclusively grey cars. In August '81 the factory had nearly a completely even distribution among the 4 build combinations. The highest manufacturing volume was in October '81. I hope you enjoy the materials. Knut