How rare is that car? Production numbers vs cars on the road

"That is a rare one" can mean two quite different things. Sometimes it means very few were ever built. Sometimes it means plenty were built, but hardly any are left. Knowing which is which makes spotting more interesting, and it explains why a car you pass every day might be rarer than the supercar parked outside a hotel.

Rarity, measure one: how many were built

The first measure is production volume: how many of a car the manufacturer made in total.

At one end are cars built in tiny numbers on purpose. Limited editions are often numbered, some sports cars are built by hand in small batches, and homologation specials exist only because racing rules required a minimum number of road cars to be made. At the other end are mass-market models that sell in huge numbers year after year, often across several generations.

Production volume is fixed once a car goes out of production. It does not change with time, fashion or where you live, which makes it a steady way to compare cars.

Rarity, measure two: how many are still on the road

The second measure is survival: how many are still registered and in use.

Everyday cars are built in enormous numbers, but most of them are eventually scrapped. A family hatchback that was everywhere in the early 1990s can be a genuinely unusual sight today, even though it was one of the best-selling cars of its time. Meanwhile, a limited-run sports car is often kept, garaged and looked after, so a high proportion of them may survive.

So a car can be common by one measure and rare by the other.

Where to find UK figures

For cars on UK roads, the best public source is the Department for Transport. It publishes vehicle licensing statistics on GOV.UK, including a table of vehicles by make and model (table VEH0120). It separates vehicles that are licensed from those declared off the road with a SORN, and it goes back decades, so you can see how quickly a model is disappearing.

A few things to bear in mind when you use it:

• model names in the tables are not always as detailed as a car's badge, so special versions can be grouped in with ordinary ones
• a SORN car still exists, it is just not being used on the road
• the figures cover UK registrations only, not how many were built worldwide

For production numbers, manufacturers, owners' clubs and specialist books are usually the best sources, and figures for limited editions are often published at launch.

Why price is not rarity

It is easy to assume an expensive car must be rare. Often it is not. A large luxury SUV can cost six figures and still be a common sight in some areas, because lots of people buy them. A special edition of a cheap hatchback, made in a run of a few hundred, can be far harder to find.

Price tells you what a car cost. Rarity tells you how many of them exist. They are related, but they are not the same thing.

How CarSnapper decides rarity

In CarSnapper, every car gets one of five tiers: Common, Uncommon, Rare, Very Rare and Ultra Rare. The tier is based on how many of that car exist, not on its price, and there is no luck involved. The car in your photo decides the card you get.

A few things follow from that:

• A car's tier does not depend on how often it is spotted. Lots of people photographing a car in one city does not make it more common.
• The tier describes the car the photo can show. A photo cannot always tell two versions of the same model apart, so the card describes the car as precisely as the photo allows, such as its model and generation.
• New cards may take a moment. When a car is new to the app, its figures and tier are looked up as the card is created, so a card can show its tier as being confirmed for a short while.

Rarer cars earn more XP the first time they join your collection, but a Common still counts. Plenty of spotters would say the best cars are the everyday ones that have quietly become hard to find.

The short version

Rarity can mean how many were built or how many survive, and the answer can be different for the same car. Price is a poor guide to either. For UK road figures, start with the Department for Transport's licensing statistics, and for production numbers, go to the manufacturer or the owners' club.

If you want to keep a record of what you find, our beginner's guide to car spotting is a good place to start.