Canadian allocations and stats

From that site it is still hit and miss, but improving.

Posted on 4/26/23, 11:19 PM (Edited on 4/26/23, 11:21 PM)

Well, I just wasn't happy to basically ignore the Canadian market. I started looking through some code, and while I still can't pull every piece of data for the Canadian market cars, I can pull enough to add the very basic car info in the database. So this way the Canadians who visit the site will be able to see all of the cars that are built for Canada and see the rate of production, what dealers are getting them, just the basics. The options data is still very incomplete, so there isn't any point in a detailed dashboard for Canadian cars.

All updates starting tomorrow should pull all the Canadian market cars that the script can find. Adding previously built cars will take some time. Z06's are easy because there aren't many of them so that should be done this weekend, but the Stingrays will take some time. I will probably slowly work thru this over the next month or so.

For model year 2024, I am planning to pretty much rewrite my script that pulls and processes the window stickers. I don't plan to address the rest of the Canadian window sticker headaches until that time. I am going to rewrite the script using a different language (or at least a better library for reading the PDFs) so its easier to pull the data out of the difficult Canadian. Every library I have tried for my current code leaves a lot to be desired (they basically can't pull all of the text out of the PDF)... so its time to move on.
 
ggurface said:
Available here: https://www.c8tracker.com/dealers

Wilson Niblett #1 with 39 2023 c8's sold (as tracked by that website)

Cullen #2 with 35

Spencer #3 (in Ontario) with 29

Hope this helps
Click to expand...
Cullens have received 80 allocations/cars in the last 12 months, Spencer and Niblett have also received way more than what is reported on C8Tracker. Hopefully improvements to the site can get us real numbers at list going forward for 2024.
 
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From what I know and as others have said, some of the Canadian numbers are indeed low. With C8 Stingray production up, the numbers for everyone are up as well. Does anyone know if the numbers include Z06's? I assume they do, since Stingrays and Z06's are all "C8's". I wonder how often this list is updated and who prepared it?

To save you time, the Canadian numbers displayed as of today:

39: Wilson-Niblett (top Canadian allocation; compare to 1,459 MacMulken Chev in the States as their top dealer)
35: Brian Cullen
32: Sherwood Park (goes to show you that "bad guys" do finish near the top...arrrrrrgh! way to go GM! reward them with allocations! more money WAAAAY over MSRP in their pocket; life is good....for THEM)
29: Bill Spencer
18: Jack Carter
17: Capital Chev
15: Paul Sadlon
15: Thibault Chev
14: Barry Cullen
14: Dueck Chev
13: Kelowna Chev
13: Shaganappi
13: Eastside Chev
13: Humberview
13: Bourgeois Chev
13: Lounsbury Chev
12: Finch Chev
12: Wheaton Chev (Red Deer)
12: Boisvert Chev
11: Don Wheaton Chev (Ed)
11: Northgate
10: Automobiles Paille
10: Wheaton Chev (Regina)
10: Leggat Chev
10: CMP Chev
9 or less: check the list (I stopped at 10 or more)
 
I found the Z06 portion of this same "tracker":

c8tracker.com

C8Tracker : Stingray vs. Z06

This site was designed to gather production information about C8 Corvettes and make it available for Corvette and other automotive enthusiasts.
c8tracker.com c8tracker.com

And almost fell off my chair when it listed 5 Z06 allocations going to Competition Chev in Stony Plain (AB), since that's not a dealership known to sell many Corvettes in my area. I called and spoke with someone in management and was told they'd received only 1 Z06 allocation, showing this list to be wildly inaccurate, at least as far as allocations to that dealer are concerned. As well, the list suggests that Capital Chev (Calgary) received 1 Z06 allocation and Jack Carter (Calgary) zero. I know those to be wrong. So I suggest extreme caution when looking at these lists and question whether it's worthwhile to look at them at all.
 
DenisC8 said:
C8tracker didn’t start from the start of 2023 production as far as I know, and the creator said that his algorithm is struggling with Canadian information and that he plans to improve it going forward
Click to expand...

Thanks for that clarification DenisC8. Much appreciated. Hopefully the accuracy of the Canadian stats will improve. It would be great to have a "one-shop-stop go-to" statistical reference that shows true numbers.
 
Smithers (creator of C8 Tracker) and I have worked together to pull data. His scripts as noted above are not yet accurate whereas the Z06 data I pull is purely myself copying and pasting in every single Z06 built! Yes, its a tedious process but I now ignore all US cars and solely focus on the Canadian Z06.

Stingrays I also ignore because there's over 30k of them to go through...nope!
 
CamsC8 said:
Smithers (creator of C8 Tracker) and I have worked together to pull data. His scripts as noted above are not yet accurate whereas the Z06 data I pull is purely myself copying and pasting in every single Z06 built! Yes, its a tedious process but I now ignore all US cars and solely focus on the Canadian Z06.

Stingrays I also ignore because there's over 30k of them to go through...nope!
Click to expand...

I responded to a post from "smithers" on the "other Corvette forum" that he frequents and we're now "PM'g" each other, and he's also explained why his Canadian stats aren't accurate. The time you spend figuring out what's going on in with Canadian Z06's CamsC8, is very much appreciated! Thanks!
 
CamsC8 said:
Smithers (creator of C8 Tracker) and I have worked together to pull data. His scripts as noted above are not yet accurate whereas the Z06 data I pull is purely myself copying and pasting in every single Z06 built! Yes, its a tedious process but I now ignore all US cars and solely focus on the Canadian Z06.

Stingrays I also ignore because there's over 30k of them to go through...nope!
Click to expand...

If you need help or can 'guide' me to the source of this data I can always write something up and slap it on here to save you some effort/time.
 
Nik said:
If you need help or can 'guide' me to the source of this data I can always write something up and slap it on here to save you some effort/time.
Click to expand...
Its based on scraping the GM VIN Window sticker method. And there are only a set # of combinations for each vin. I think the only variables are HTC/Coupe, and 1l3/2l3/3lt.

So you try those 6 combinations for every vin 5 digit ending (which is not a real variable, since it sequentially increases). And one of those should hit.

2022_vin_card_88d9bb2889ce11e2b7ed22287850f032063ff131.jpg
 
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Hey everyone, I'm the same smithers that is behind the C8Tracker website. I had noticed a bit of a jump in traffic to my site coming from Canada and saw this site in the referrer logs so I figured I'd pop in and look around. I can clear up some of the questions around the Canadian data on my site. This might get a little long..lol

When I started writing the code to find and process the window stickers, I was focused on the Z06 and at that time, none of the Canadian Z06 window stickers were available online yet (and some still aren't.. its an odd situation). The US market window stickers have some JSON formatted data in them that include pretty much all the cars info, and a full list of RPO codes for the option it had. Super easy to scoop that data up and drop it in my database. When I had my code start pulling in the Stingray data a few months ago, I saw some Canadian cars in the mix so I basically just went "sweet, my code works with the Canadian cars" and didn't look much deeper into it as everything appeared to work perfect. Eventually I came across some instances where window stickers were making my code choke and as I dug into that I found there are 3-4 different varieties of Canadian window stickers. One has that JSON formatted data.. the rest don't. So most of them just aren't that easy to work with when it comes to 'processing' them with code.

So I will have to do a lot of code work and testing to get my site to be able to process all the different Canadian window stickers to the same level of detail as it can with the US window stickers. Getting it to that point just isn't really a priority. Eventually I will have it done as I want all of this sorted out when MY2024 starts. When I have the new and improved code ready, I plan to go back and pull all the option data and stuff that is missing with the MY2023 Canadian cars, and maybe even add MY2020-2022 to the database just to cover everything.. because why not lol

Now, whats the status of the Canadian cars on C8Tracker? I can easily have it seek out window stickers and add the basic info for the car into my database. So things like the VIN, model, bodystyle, dealer, year, and some other stuff gets added to the database (no options data though). My goal here is just to get the site to a point where you guys can use it to track things like what dealers are getting cars and an idea of the rate of production with a pretty good level of accuracy. I'm sure some of you have noticed that a ton of Canadian cars are getting added to the site over these last few days. I'm basically having my code go thru a months worth of VIN ranges at a time and add those cars to the database. Since the Canadian window stickers largely don't have the "creation date" for the window sticker that the US cars do, I'm just giving them all a creation data for the first day of the month for the VIN range. This is just for the older cars, newly produced cars that don't have this date in the window sticker are getting one that lines up with the day the sticker became available online... so those will be accurate to within a couple of days. The older cars are going to be accurate to the month they were built (based on the VIN range they fall in).

I think I saw a question about how often the site is updated. The data pulling is basically 100% automated and happens 5 days a week. Since the factory runs Monday thru Friday and the window stickers are typically released the next day, the update script runs daily from Tuesday to Saturday. It kicks off at about noon eastern time and takes 3-4 hours to do its thing (it's throttled so it doesn't just relentlessly hammer the GM site).

Just as a side note.. a lot of people around the Corvette corner of the internet have said random things like my site is missing a ton of cars or whatever. Usually they just don't understand that the entire VIN range isn't for the US and Canada. As I pull in the older Canadian 2023 Stingrays, the site is also adding some US market cars that it missed on its first pass to download the bulk of 2023 data (it happens.. to collect all this data I have thrown over 100,000 requests at the GM window sticker site.. some of those requests will fail or the GM site will have random issues). As I have been adding these Canadian Stingrays.. the site has gone thru nearly 16,000 VINs and only found 14 US market cars that it missed on its first attempt a few months ago. So it has only missed 0.0875% of cars. I think that's pretty good lol The newer cars get searched for several times over the course of a month, so if the window sticker exists, it will get found pretty quickly after it becomes available.

Anyone.. happy to handle any questions. I'm not trying to be a spam bot so I'll just stick to this thread haha
 
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smithers said:
Hey everyone, I'm the same smithers that is behind the C8Tracker website. I had noticed a bit of a jump in traffic to my site coming from Canada and saw this site in the referrer logs so I figured I'd pop in and look around. I can clear up some of the questions around the Canadian data on my site. This might get a little long..lol

When I started writing the code to find and process the window stickers, I was focused on the Z06 and at that time, none of the Canadian Z06 window stickers were available online yet (and some still aren't.. its an odd situation). The US market window stickers have some JSON formatted data in them that include pretty much all the cars info, and a full list of RPO codes for the option it had. Super easy to scoop that data up and drop it in my database. When I had my code start pulling in the Stingray data a few months ago, I saw some Canadian cars in the mix so I basically just went "sweet, my code works with the Canadian cars" and didn't look much deeper into it as everything appeared to work perfect. Eventually I came across some instances where window stickers were making my code choke and as I dug into that I found there are 3-4 different varieties of Canadian window stickers. One has that JSON formatted data.. the rest don't. So most of them just aren't that easy to work with when it comes to 'processing' them with code.

So I will have to do a lot of code work and testing to get my site to be able to process all the different Canadian window stickers to the same level of detail as it can with the US window stickers. Getting it to that point just isn't really a priority. Eventually I will have it done as I want all of this sorted out when MY2024 starts. When I have the new and improved code ready, I plan to go back and pull all the option data and stuff that is missing with the MY2023 Canadian cars, and maybe even add MY2020-2022 to the database just to cover everything.. because why not lol

Now, whats the status of the Canadian cars on C8Tracker? I can easily have it seek out window stickers and add the basic info for the car into my database. So things like the VIN, model, bodystyle, dealer, year, and some other stuff gets added to the database (no options data though). My goal here is just to get the site to a point where you guys can use it to track things like what dealers are getting cars and an idea of the rate of production with a pretty good level of accuracy. I'm sure some of you have noticed that a ton of Canadian cars are getting added to the site over these last few days. I'm basically having my code go thru a months worth of VIN ranges at a time and add those cars to the database. Since the Canadian window stickers largely don't have the "creation date" for the window sticker that the US cars do, I'm just giving them all a creation data for the first day of the month for the VIN range. This is just for the older cars, newly produced cars that don't have this date in the window sticker are getting one that lines up with the day the sticker became available online... so those will be accurate to within a couple of days. The older cars are going to be accurate to the month they were built (based on the VIN range they fall in).

I think I saw a question about how often the site is updated. The data pulling is basically 100% automated and happens 5 days a week. Since the factory runs Monday thru Friday and the window stickers are typically released the next day, the update script runs daily from Tuesday to Saturday. It kicks off at about noon eastern time and takes 3-4 hours to do its thing (it's throttled so it doesn't just relentlessly hammer the GM site).

Just as a side note.. a lot of people around the Corvette corner of the internet have said random things like my site is missing a ton of cars or whatever. Usually they just don't understand that the entire VIN range isn't for the US and Canada. As I pull in the older Canadian 2023 Stingrays, the site is also adding some US market cars that it missed on its first pass to download the bulk of 2023 data (it happens.. to collect all this data I have thrown over 100,000 requests at the GM window sticker site.. some of those requests will fail or the GM site will have random issues). As I have been adding these Canadian Stingrays.. the site has gone thru nearly 16,000 VINs and only found 14 US market cars that it missed on its first attempt a few months ago. So it has only missed 0.0875% of cars. I think that's pretty good lol The newer cars get searched for several times over the course of a month, so if the window sticker exists, it will get found pretty quickly after it becomes available.

Anyone.. happy to handle any questions. I'm not trying to be a spam bot so I'll just stick to this thread haha
Click to expand...
Welcome to the forum. Thank you very much for your hard work and effort to include Canadian Vins as this data has cleared up many assumptions and speculations.
 
smithers said:
I made a small tweak to the Dealer and Vehicle list pages.. you can now filter the list by country. So I would imagine you guys would prefer to see just the Canadian cars or dealers on the lists... just click "Canada" on the "filter by country" line and it'll happen. Figured that would make things easier for you all.
Click to expand...
That’s awesome, thanks for doing that
 
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