I can't speak for other eras, but certainly there is a very, very large (although it's never large enough!) set of data available for shipbuilding in the 17th and 18th centuries and what those ships did after being built.

This comes in the form of the archives of the Dutch East India Company (VOC), a megacorporation that was involved in shipping, trading, cash crop production and more in Europe, Asia and Africa. Though some documents have of course been lost, what has been preserved comprises 25 million pages, takes up over 4 kilometres of shelf space and is spread across centres in multiple cities. The bulk of these records are preserved in The Hague and Jakarta; smaller volumes are also preserved in Cape Town, Colombo and Chennai. The archives contain contracts, ships' logs, reports, correspondence and many other documents generated by the company over its nearly 200-year existence.

The archives of its rival, the English East India Company, have also been well preserved.

Both these companies' archives have been at least partly digitised. If you have an account, you can access the English East India Company's over here.

And if you understand Dutch you can access the VOC's archives here.

Shipbuilding is not something I am particularly familiar with so I can't give any insight into what is a fascinating and complex industry. However, I want to point out that the ships of this era were designed mainly for transport, and, in some waters, defence, of cargo, and operated under a B2B (Business to Business) model. This led to quite a different set of considerations from the present day automobile industry, which is built around personal mobility in a mainly civilian environment and operates under a B2C (Business to Consumer) model.