Keiths Fourth PM
And lastly, here is the response from JohnV to my email I sent: I remember the original post about this car. I would agree that Peter Toth was likely an employee who purchased this previously licensed car, still owned by PMD and most recently used as a Company Car, for $3000 at the end of Aug. '72 when the car was nearly a year old. If I was JL Harper, I would be attempting to track down Peter Toth (or a family member) in the Pontiac, Mich area pronto. Since he has an address, that would be a good place to start. According to the Invoice Identification No., Mr. Toth paid cash to acquire the car. But basically, Mr. Toth paid $3000 to buy a GTO that showed $4141.70 on the Window Sticker, before Destination amount, so he got a pretty good bargain for a car that probably had low miles. The License & Title cost plus a 4% (if I read it correctly) cost at $114.07 for some Misc thing have been added to the Total Cost of the Car & Options to get a Total of $2974.36. To that they added a Charge of $12.70 in a Box labelled I think "D & H AMOUNT". The Total "cost" is then $2987.06 How that played in to the $3000 Price paid by Peter Toth, I'm not sure. The D & H AMOUNT seems to be explained in a notation on the 2nd Invoice that shows this as some sort of pass thru cost related to the Manufacturer of Tires, indicated as a tax on the weight of new tires. Note, all of the FDH amounts have been deleted from the 3rd Invoice Record. Couple odd things based on the sequence of the three Invoice records. Earliest record shows the Car "Sold To" the PMD Show Car Pool, Zone 35 (PMD Engineering best I know). "Dealer No." 996. "Date of Execution" is Dec. 3, 1971. Strange (to me), the Invoice ID No. is 908377. Earlier years, the ID No. was sequential for the Model Year, would have been very low in Dec. '71. I have very few '72 Invoice records, but I do not think this changed for the '72 Model Year. Consequently, I suspect the coding of this ID Sequence No. is specific for a car that was being "invoiced" for internal accounting purposes.
In other words, the leading digit "9" can be ignored and this was perhaps the 8,377th internal "transaction" that was invoiced (or more appropriately, charged to) to a PMD Dept.
Next, the 2nd Invoice has a "Date of Execution" of Dec. 14, 1971. ID no. has advanced to 909194.
The 30% amount has been reduced from $3216.40 by deleting the $237.16 FDH Amount and adding back the $12.70 D & H Amount. But I do not know how the "30% Amount" is determined to start with.
The Car has now been identified as a Factory CC (Company Car) Car. It is still shown in "Zone" 35, but now "Dealer" 997. This may suggest that the car was now switched for accounting purposes from one internal Dept. to another, again strictly for internal budget accounting. Probably the car was now licensed and ultimately the cost of those tags was reflected in the cost of the vehicle when finally sold, which probably had tax implications. PMD was able to show essentially no profit when the car was sold to Peter Toth. Note, the 2nd Invoice deleted the FDH Amounts for the Car and each Option, same as seen on the 3rd Invoice.
It is conceivable to me that the car was originally used for Shows and then put into service as a Company Car. I would think "Shows" could have included the Michigan State Fair, and perhaps some others. When was the Detroit Auto Show that year?
Finally, on Aug. 31, 1972, it was sold to a "customer" and taken off the Books as a PMD Asset.
Note the "Zone" is now 50. This is not associated with any actual Zone that I can determine, however, may have been used for "direct" sales whereby no Retail Dealer was involved in the transaction.
Note the ID No. is 739595, this is more in keeping with how many cars PMD likely invoiced for the '72 Model Year by Aug. 31, 1972. What is somewhat odd to me is that the car would have been produced much earlier (I assume) than Dec., yet not Charged To an internal dept. until then. How was the car accounted for prior to that, or perhaps there would have been an even earlier Invoice Record? Maybe the 1st Invoice was intended to reflect the "cost" hit that went against the Dept. responsible for the Show Car Pool fleet and generated when they eliminated it from their fleet?
I suspect the best way to learn the early history would be to locate Peter Toth. At best however, he may be elderly now. I'm not sure how "special" this car can be considered. I suspect PMD had multiple models they would exhibit. Most Assembly Plants exhibited the cars they were producing in some sort of display, I'm guessing the Pontiac Plant was no different, though those cars may have been charged to the Plant until sold. The most "interesting" thing about some of these "company cars" is that they are usually pretty loaded. That should be no surprise as the cars could then "show-off" many of the available options that Buyers might be induced to order.
__________________
|