DVLA revords versus reality

[livermoreb]

I recently received the latest edition of the BOC members register and, being a 410 owner, turned to the records of 410 owners in the lists.
I was surprised to see 35 410 cars listed, especially as I had looked up the car in the How Many Left website to see that only 8 were shown shown to be still on the road.
Being an inquisitive type, I looked into this discrepancy and found the following:

14 cars are registered as being currently on the road in the UK,
8 are shown as being overseas,
1 is currently on SORN,
1 is shown as a Volvo and untaxed since 1987,
1 came up as not known, and
11 were shown as being registered as Bristol BLMC.

My own car was shown as BLMC when I bought it so I pointed out the error to DVLA and they changed their record to show it correctly as a Bristol. I was left wondering how this mistaken identity arose. Does anyone have the answer to this?

[Philip]

I assume it was a mistake that happened when the DVLA first started to computerise their records.

[David C]

I think Phillip is right. Several of us contacted the DVLA at the time but it was quite some time before they were willing and able to change it. There may well be a fair proportion labelled as such. If you put Bristol BLMC into the How Many Left website you get about 5000 dropping to about 1000 presumably as owners changed the details but even this is very unreliable as there are some made pre war and a fair number with diesel engines.

[David C]

It looks as though the How Many left websites rely on numbers licensed and / or with MOT which isn't very helpful when applied to classic cars. Even the non SORN information won't necessarily tell the full story. There are still cars under repair that have not been licensed since SORN came in so are not recorded.

[Sam410]

I suspect the Bristol BLMC figure on howmanyleft also includes Bristol buses.

[Sam410]

There is an interesting note about the data on the site:

"The limitations of these make and model statistics are not errors in the DVLA database, but issues with the statistical process used.

If a vehicle keeper believes that there is a specific error on the V5 document for their own vehicle, they should contact the DVLA directly to have this corrected.

Vehicle manufacturers submit vehicle information at point of first registration and DVLA do not change it unless prompted. This means that most mistakes in the final data are usually because of administrative errors made by the manufacturer. Other mistakes can occur when vehicles are registered manually using a paper form as there is opportunity for typographic errors.

Other issues include

vehicles registered before 1963 are less likely to have a specific model name or any model name at all. Model names would only have existed if the manufacturer created one at the time
model names are not designed to fully describe the vehicle, so different "marks" or trims might be included as one model name, despite being different vehicles (for example Volkswagen Golf)
imported vehicles (that have not been on general sale in the UK) would not have a code available. DVLA attempts to find a near match but usually end up setting them to 'model missing"
some smaller vehicle manufacturers are not part of the encoding scheme, so their vehicles are registered with the correct make code, but do not have any model codes
multistage build vehicles (for example motorhomes) are likely to have a mix of makes and models from the base and final manufacturers
Any vehicle of a given model name which cannot be found in the data will most likely be included in the missing categories."

As Philip said above, I believe the BLMC was appended to the Bristol cars during the computerisation of the records in the early 1980s. Someone in Swansea clearly thought that Bristol was part of BL and added the suffix. If you send your V5 off with a covering letter they will correct it and add the model name (number). I think they will even add S1, S2, etc as appropriate in a sub-model field of the database if you want.