Car companies are like any business. You don't make too much money by looking back and admiring what you made in the past. There's only one way forward. That's not by cataloging 3 million cars you built twenty plus years ago. I really don't understand why they even still have the records really.

It is a SH!TLOAD of work to get info off the microfiche to Excel, and then it is only some data you will get. For a lot of cars no engine number is recorded, apart from LH-LX you cannot predict chassis number and the body number off Elizabeth vehicles until about 8/77 and on Pagewood and Dandenong and Acacia Ridge at various times into HQ had a body number that does not equal the PSN numerical component. There is also no colour or trim info. And the coding used to describe the vehicles' mechanical build configuration (BETSBAC) is not a simple, straight forward system - it is much more complicated than just about everyone realises. So by simply having a database gleaned from microfiche records really is of limited use for researchers, as you also have to have 1000's of vehicles recorded off actual ID plates and know what the car actually was (eg records say 8N80 for a HJ ute, they don't tell you it was a Sandman - you need to know that to make sense of the coding), and then you have a chance of understanding what the 'fiche records tell you. Then there are the cars that do not appear in the microfiche report for various reasons. On top of that you have to understand implicitly what data went into the IBM360 and when, and how it was entered, as the 'fiche records are full of human data entry errors, and you have to think laterally most of the time and not take the data as gospel. Certain XU1 spruikers have been caught with their pants down a few times due to treating the records as 100% accurate.
Believe me, I've done all this and know how hard it is. I've transcribed all Dandenong HZ off the 'fiche, and it took like 3 weeks for about 600 cars. I've tried high res searchable pdf - doesn't work. I have all 151 XU1's in the records built post the appearance of the 150 list engines, in Excel. There are at least 5 in there with data entry errors in their engine numbers, again certain people essentially have egg on their faces in print as they have miraculously found some of these data entry engines? The work it takes to transcribe this data out you cannot comprehend until you do it. And as Warren says in a prior post, who the hell is going to be silly enough to bother to do this for anything other than the pinnacle cars ie 350 HQ's, XU1, L34 and A9X? No-one has the hours of life to waste looking for high volume stuff like SLR5000, GTS sedan etc let alone anything else. And in the end the existing microfiche records are incomplete: no HZ past just prior to VB Commodore, no HQ from Elizabeth past June 1974. Plus all the cars not in the report as it is a Service/Warranty report and for various reasons some cars never made it into the original printout.

Microfiche reader is easy!