Reply to "vin numbers"

There was one official registry, put together by the esteemed historian of out marque, Bill Van Ess. But what any enthusiast who tries to put together a registry soon finds out, a majority of owners are apathetic about such an endeavor, so the registry is not as complete and informative as was hoped.

The DeTomaso factory has good documentation of the cars built after the Ford era. The cars built during the Ford era have no documentation at this time. It is uncertain if the documentation was destroyed, or if it is merely sitting in a box somewhere, long forgotten by Ford. The Ford guy in charge of the Pantera project, Ray Geddes, should know. Mr. Geddes is in retirement. Hopefully somebody will have the opportunity to ask him someday.

There are 5 bits of info needed from each Pantera to paint a picture of Pantera production: (1) the chassis number (2) the body service number (3) the build date on the door jamb (4) the original destination (5) the original model type (because some cars have been modified into Gp4 race cars, GT5 & GT5-S).

Today there are several mini-registries about. There's the push-button registry, Ben Tyer's QV500, Peter Havlik's wide body registry, Ron Hyde's registry. I understand POCA has talked about putting one together on their web site. We did a poll here on the DTIC earlier this year, I asked for a virtual show of cyber-hands, asking who was interested in putting together such a registry. Out of the 150 or so members who regularly contribute to these forums, about 1/2 dozen members wrote they were interested. Now THAT'S apathy.

Still, I am aware of a web based registry in the planning stages, the owner has sworn me to silence. Such an endeavor involves a hefty financial investment in programming and server bandwidth. He wants to protect his investment.

Many registries for other marques are put together out of necessity. For instance, in the 1980's Shelby Mustang "fakes" were rampant, parts were readily available to turn regualr 1965 Mustangs into the highly valued Shelby versions, so to prevent fraud and give buyers legal assistance, a registry was started. Whenever certain low volume models exist within the general production run of a certain model, and those low volume models have significantly more value than the run of the mill variety, and when it is easy to make the run of the mill car into a fraudulant copy of the low volume car, registries become a necessity. The fraudulant sale of DeTomaso automobiles is not a rampant problem at this time. So we don't need a registry to document the authenticity of our cars, but it would be nice to develope a more precise understanding of the production history.

cowboy from hell