[WQ59B]

Originally Posted by John V.

...Mogol as Code 23-250 where it "fits" more appropriately in alphabetical sequence.

The issue with this is obvious upon reflection; the list could only be alphabetical for a short while after it's creation. New dealers with varied names would have had to be listed out of numerical/alphabetical order at least a majority of times.

And some dealers dropped out of business all along the timeline, even in the heyday of Pontiac minting money (the '60s). Tho this would mean their dealer number was 'available' (and they did get reassigned in some instances), that doesn't mean such a reassignment would be alphabetical WRT whatever a new dealer might be named.

Once you have '01 001 AA Pontiac' and '01 002 BB Pontiac' and along comes 'AB Pontiac' in that zone, the list is going to 'get out of whack'.

At some point I believe in the 1980s, a 'second tier' of dealers were alphabetically listed, at higher numerical numbers. In other words (for a hypothetical example); xx-001 ~ xx-400 was followed by xx-401 starting over with dealers named with 'A' again.

Also at some point in this period, some zones were eliminated/combined, resulting in 5 or 6 states in one zone instead of 2-3. Don't know yet exactly when this occurred.

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Obviously, PMD never 'engineered' this system to forever follow a rigid code of organization.

[WQ59B]

Originally Posted by WQ59B

UPDATE :: 2400 coded dealers, 5400 total. Still uploading.

New dealers still straggle in, but I believe I am in the home stretch of compiling.

My Pontiac dealer list is now about 4300 coded, 7400 total. Now to cross-check coded with uncoded to eliminate any duplicates.

[WQ59B]

2022 update : my Pontiac dealer list is currently about 4800 coded, and about 9900 total. I continue to work on this list regularly.

Some observations ~

• Not positive PMD skipped numbers to maintain future alphabetizing. I have some runs of numbers which suggest they didn't (470, 471, 472, 473, 474, 475, 476, 478, 479, 480, 481)... but mathematically the system allows for a far greater number of dealers than Pontiac ever would have (27 zones x 999 codes = 26,973 dealers), so... there was plenty of room to. But via observation, I haven't seen a clear pattern yet.

• The zone/dealer code system got some modifications right about 1987.

Some zones received new dealer #s starting 'high' numerically. Zone 10 is one; around 10 600 starts a new batch of dealers, not all of them correctly alphabetized.

• Some dealers with the same name/address appear in 2 different zones; the 'divider' there being... the year circa '87. Wright Motors of Evansville IN is in Zone 12 (sources: '69, '75), but is also in Zone 9 with an '89 source. This may be a circumstance of the '87 mods, when it seems a few zones 'went dormant'.

An example of this is Zone 12 - I have no newer source years for the dealers in 12 than the mid 80s (unless it was in business unchanged since before that, and continued). In other words: there appear to be no newly-issued codes in Zone 12 after '87. There's a few more Zones like 12, post 1987.

I think we'd certainly like to have a rigid, well-defined system here, but GM has a long habit of... not doing that. If you get a chance to see a list of GM's XP-project vehicle numbers, they did it again there.