57 2dr. sedans

[4banger]

How many 57 2dr. sedans ( custom or custom 300 ) are in existance in the U.S. of A. ?Driveable,not basket cases. Street or track driven.

[Lou]

Anyone who quotes you a number is blowing smoke up your A--. there is no way of knowing. All I'll say is there are a lot more of all models than people relize.

[wolfpupsdad]

 this site will give ya how many of any one model was produced.  i know of one 57 custom 300 went to the grave yard in 1965 , my dad got T- boned by  drunk in the right rear quarter.
http://www.lovefords.org/tech/production/57.htm

[4banger]

Hey Lou, sounds to me that your the one blowing the " smoke "

[Lou]

ah....What did I miss here?... I know the production figures, but that wasn't what i thought you asked.... sorry if I misunderstood the meaning of the "in existence"?

[JPotter57]

Hard to say about "in existence".   A lot of `57 sedans were used up in the early days of NASCAR, plus a lot were wrecked, plus a lot are in scrapyards and/or were crushed.  Good news though, they made a lot of `57s, so there are still a lot of them out there.

[4banger]

Lou, your last reply was cool. No hard feelings. I just thought someone might have seen some numbers in articles out there.

[Lou]

4 banger, the problem with trying to find out the true number of a old car that still exist is the information is not in any one place. What do you use, tax records?, you would have to go to every town hall and look it up. Motor vehicle reg?, a lot of states will not release that information, and many owners of more than one car do not register all their cars, etc. I'm sure you get the idea.
For several years a guy used to advertise in Hemminging motor news that he had a computer that could track any and all old cars and could tell you how many of a model were left for $30. He got away with this scam for several years. What he was doing was he had production numbers (I have that book too) and was using the 10% a year lost formular. That is a old rule of thumb used by the insurance compaines in the 1940s & 1950s to figure loss rates. But what that was set up was for total production of all makes in a year, at a time when few cars lasted to a 100,000 miles.
In the mid 1980s I did some research on survival rates at the request of several of my insurance company clients, mainly Travelers, Handover, and Hartford Underwriters. They were more interested in what and why a certin car survived than numbers. Some interesting facts came to light. (again remember this is based on cars built before 1960, and was done before the new oils, like Mobil 1, came on the market).
After the 18th year the loss rate slows to less than 2%, and after the 22 year it is less than 1/2 a %
More expensive models, except convertibles (soft top), have a higher survival rate.
The car models that have clubs, such as the Retrackable, little T-Birds, Crown Vic, etc have a 5 times survival rate of models that do not.
Convertibles (soft top)have the highest loss rate, but also the highest restoration rate.
Ford made 1,676,448 - 1957 Fords, so if only 1/2 of 1% survived thats over 8000 cars.