Quoting Hertz:
We don't know for certain how many remain, but here's my best deduction:
We are currently tracking 717 badges in our membership (active in the last year) and our registry project, which attempts to document VIN and badge number, has the following: 366 '91s and 193 '92s for 559 total matches between VIN and badge. Of those 559, 38 '91s and 16 '92s for 54 total documented scrapped (About 10%). So let's say that enthusiasts' scrappage rate is about 10%. If we factor that 10% of those members may be scrapped it brings us down to 645.
717 badges out of 2,638 current members is 27% so I believe at least 27% of our users currently have or had a VR-4. Our current membership vs. historic membership (10,501 members) roughly gives us 25% representation of the general public. So I would say our community's slice of the total USDM VR-4 population is likely between 25-27% of the total.
Take the maximum examples of 3,009 at 25% and we have 752. That puts us within 5% of our 717, and since not all members list their badge numbers, I think we're close.
Nationwide, scrappage rates have been 70% to 85% and rising between 1990 and 2010. So let's take the membership out of the population (3,009-25% = 2,256 cars) and assume that these are not held by enthusiasts and were scrapped at 75% (2,256-75% = 1,692) outside of the community.
That leaves us with 564 in the wild, 717 registered and 35 unregistered for a total of 1,316 USDM VR-4s hopefully still in existence.
Granted this is all best-guess based on numbers mostly pulled from thin air...
Is there a link that could be put right on the top of the site to the most current registry information page? Seems there are multiple threads with lists and constant new threads put up on this topic, so my assumption would be that the registry information isn't easy enough to find, otherwise we wouldn't have these threads all the time.