Is there a way to find out how many of a particular bike model were produced and/or sold?
For example, "how many Schwinn LeTour bikes were produced in 1979?" The Schwinn LeTour question is just an example--I'm hoping to find a website or search strategy for finding this data for any arbitrary bike model.
I often enjoy looking at used bikes (and sometimes buying them), and I speculate that knowing production numbers would a few advantages:
- High-production bike models might be more likely to have OEM parts available for a long time.
- High-production models may have more rants/raves/discussions on web forums, which can give indications of reliability and build quality.
- If enough data is available, it'd be cool to sort a big database of bike models by "highest to lowest production."
Note: by "high production model," I just mean "many examples (tens of thousands?) of this bike model were manufactured."
Production numbers for cars are generally easy to find (Wikipedia has a lot of them), but this question has been much harder to answer for bicycles.