**** Draft version - update due next week to include 138 more cars Oct 2024 ***
The Toyota MR2 MK1s rolled off the production lines between 1984 and 1989. This compact, mid-engined, two seater has been providing delightful motoring to enthusiastic owners ever since.
One of the pillars of the MR2 community is Neil Jones, from South Wales, who specialises in dismantling and providing spares to keep other MR2s MK1s in running order. As a result of his work he comes across many MR2 Mk1s some in dilapidated and some in perfect running order but many in between. The question he most often receives is "How many other MR2 MK1s are still on the road ?" In order to answer this question he reached out across his social media channels, dug deep into his notebooks and compiled a list of known MR2 MK1s. Myself as an owner of an MR2 had previously collected a large number of photos of other MR2s mostly from Facebook. Using these sources along with the gallaries of photos from the MR2 National Show ( years 2022, 2023, 2024) an even longer list was compiled. The official MOT and car tax check services were used to confirm the road status and year of manufacture, if not known.
This article provides an analysis of the list that currently stands at about 490 entries. Production numbers from the French MR2 Club has about 15,000 MR2 Mk1s coming to the UK. The list is mostly UK registered cars but some others are included.
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| MR2 Mk1 and Mk2 numbers. MK1 production ended in 1989. |
Age of cars
The cars on the compiled list are distributed across the late 80's and early '90s. Where the year of registration is known it is used else the registration letter is used to date the car. There are some anomalies in this list as some cars have been fitted with vanity plates and foreign registered cars do not indicate the registration year. It does appear that the most cars were registered in the Aug '88- Jul '89 & 1989 registration periods being towards the end of the production run.
Road status
The main reason for compiling this survey is to answer the question, "How many cars are still on the road ?" The answer is not so simple. There are specific legal needs to have a car on the UK roads. Mostly the survey has relied on the declaration of the owners as to the on / off the road status. Any car that showed up at the recent MR2 Drivers Club national shows is assumed to be on the road at that time (on22, on23, on24). Some cars were checked using the car tax checking lookup tools. The minor complications are that some roadworthy cars are stored off the road in an untaxed SORN state saving on costs over the winter, and some race and rally cars have MOT but no tax. It was decided to go with the total of cars in near road status as the answer to the question. The blank and not found entries are assumed to be off the road as the car may either have been scrapped, exported, or have a different registration number.
Features
As well as road going status the colour, T-bar/sunroof and current mileage were obtained by the survey where possible. We can see that there is a fairly even split between sunroof (223) and T-bar cars (208) with just 20 examples having neither.
The colour distribution of survey cars shows that red is the most popular, 167, followed by White, 141 and all the different shades of blue, 92, The official blue cars were either known as Helios blue or Mica blue however it's not always easy to determine from photos which exact shade of blue is used. The four Sherwood cars could be included in the blue category as that colouration is dark blue top half with a silver bottom half.
Mileage
Within the survey are the declared mileages and the researched mileages from the MOT look up tool. We can see that the average mileage of all the cars surveyed is about 105,000 miles. It can be seen that the 30 cars with untaxed and SORN status have slightly higher mileages 109,000 especially when compared to the cars that have a current valid MOT and are SORN, 77,000 miles.
and is believed to be owned by Nik Milford the Director of the MR2 Drivers Club
How Many Left
The "How many left" website that uses official DVLA data contributes some other numbers. Showing approximately 6000 cars on SORN and 1,735 ( 35%) are currently still licensed but has little other data regarding actual road going status or features.
Conclusions
Any 40-year-old car is going to need some attention mechanical or bodywork attention. The advantage of having an active owners community is that many of the wrinkles and foibles of the MR2 MK1 are well documented and there is a community to reach out for help and support.
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