Looks like a LHD Seville Launch car on Autotrader

[NickDunning]

https://www.autotrader.co.uk/car-det...7COSxYWf-9kURE

Price is a bit extreme though. No MOT since December 2020.

[Briodyjl01]

It might not be. It is chassis number 01641. Mine is 01507 and was too late to be a Seville car sadly.mine is about 100 odd cars after the cutoff so this will be about 200 / 250 cars after cut off.

[SD1too]

It's a gorgeous, elegant car though isn't it. I do like Atlantic Blue and there are so few of them left.

Simon

[Briodyjl01]

Originally Posted by SD1too

It's a gorgeous, elegant car though isn't it. I do like Atlantic Blue and there are so few of them left.

Simon

That’s why we have two.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[Briodyjl01]

This car has a build date of 15th February 1999. I have been able to work out the vin by using the decoder on here.

[Reebs]

I can confirm it's not a car that went to the Seville or Jerez Press launches, but it's a lovely looking early example. It left the line on 15/02/99 at 14:44:44 destined for Italy according to the build records.

[Matt_75]

How have you guys been able to work that out from the number plate?

Atlantic blue is one of my favourite 75 colours. It's a lovely early car, shame about the door speaker grille that's fallen off, hopefully repairable.

[NickDunning]

Originally Posted by Briodyjl01

It might not be. It is chassis number 01641. Mine is 01507 and was too late to be a Seville car sadly.mine is about 100 odd cars after the cutoff so this will be about 200 / 250 cars after cut off.

That's interesting. The Seville cars that returned to the UK were retrospectively registered in the S---DEH series, some not until much later. I didn't realise there were other cars also in that series.

Thanks for getting the dates gents. Interesting how it never seemingly left the UK.

Thanks
Nick

[The Rovering Member]

That is a high price. LHD too, that would put some buyers off.

[NickDunning]

A few years ago I had this conversation with Stephen Cox, who was head of Network Sales training at Longbridge. This was when I owned S392DEH, which was chassis number 001157 (the oldest surviving V6 engined car potentially).


"Your car carries the DEH alpha sequence on the plate and that indicates to me it's
one of those originally Spanish registered. Those that were licensed originally in
Birmingham carried AOX plates, like mine, S 433 AOX. The press garage had to
license these Spanish cars manually, so to speak, meaning they didn't have access to the
direct computer links manufacturers had to licence their own cars directly with DVLA.
My guess is that once they had established how to go about this by conversation with
DVLA, someone would have been given the job to batch register these "imported" cars
at a local vehicle licensing office near to someone's home! Such was the informal
nature of how Longbridge worked. I seem to remember that EH was local to Wolverhampton
In the old days of manual licensing prior to the major reorganisation of that system in
the 1970s, that bears some research of course".

It seems that cars that couldn't be registered online as previously registered abroad were hand registered possibly at Wolverhampton. Hence the S---DEH registrations.