British numbering always seems more art than science, especially when it comes to Bugeyes and other classic British cars from the late 50s and early 60s. It seems there were errors and anomalies that one would not expect.

We have written extensively about the first production Bugeye, which is AN5L 501 but shows a Vin plate without the L on it. This has been documented as human error at the factory during stamping (see #12 below) process. It was easy for us to shrug that problem off as growing pains for a busy team of people trying to pump out an inexpensive sports car at a rapid rate. (And by the way, to build 50,000 sports cars in that era in just three years is actually a very impressive accomplishment!)

This week we saw something new on car number AN5L 49296, a car near the end of the Bugeye production run. When we removed the dashboard for a re-wiring, we found that the back of the dash shows a different number than the chassis plate, off by one digit, thus a new type of numbering error that we not seen before.


In this case perhaps the green dashboard was built and marked with the specs for car number 49297, but 49296 was the next car that had a green exterior and fit this dashboard, so they made the swap, likely without even noticing. In other words, in the fast-paced production line presumably they worried more about putting like with like, and didn’t put as much emphasis on the numbers being accurate on the back. Its human error, once again displayed on the British car assembly line.
Sometimes, we get an additional window into the challenges faced at the Spridget factory, as evidenced by the Heritage certificate below:

Here’s a picture of the heritage certificate for the Midget we are selling shortly on Bring a Trailer, a special “unrestored” car that was the subject of a $23k mech refresh.
Note the engine information, this car had 2 other engines and one other transmission before it left the factory, more evidence of human error, and how the factory dealt with it!
If you’d like a heritage certificate for your car to see if there are any anomalies, click here and we will get you one!