![]() Body styles included two-door and four-door hardtops, and a convertible. Visually, the Centurion was nearly identical to the contemporaneous Buick LeSabre, featuring different badging and grillework, minimal chrome trim, and marked by an absence of the VentiPort usually found on full-size Buicks. What’s impressive about that is the fact that many of those cars got it right, at least in some crude way.First seen on a concept car, the name Centurion was very similar to the name Century. ![]() ![]() The point was to get people interested in their vehicles by seeing what cars had in store for the distant future. The 1956 Buick Centurion wasn’t the only concept car of its day. When you opened the doors, the front seats would automatically slide back to allow you easy entry into the vehicle and easy exit when you went to leave. Now, we see this feature in our modern vehicles, but not exactly like what the Centurion had. The last awesome feature was the automatic front seats. This was a concept that definitely seemed out of this world for those in the ’50s. It was a dial located on the steering wheel. The gear selection dial caught many people’s eyes because it wasn’t a lever you pulled. The same design feature adorned the front bumper as well as the rear one. The fenders were very much jet-like, and they were so stylish that Buick adopted the design to use in some of their later models. Other impressive features of the Buick Centurion that amazed people included the wing-like fenders, a gear selection dial, and automatic front seats. Other features of the 1956 Buick Centurion Why would they need them when you could see everything on the camera screen? Today, however, we continue to use mirrors. This type of technology allowed drivers to get by without the use of any mirrors, which is why you don’t see them on this car. The camera is of different quality now, but back then, the television camera was the highest quality they had, and it blew some people’s minds away at the time. This is much like the infotainment screens we use today. The camera would record images from behind the car and then would transmit those images to the screen placed on the front dash. ![]() Jordan rigged up a television camera installed on the rear of the vehicle above the trunk logo. The Centurion had a crude version of it, but nevertheless, the concept was the same. But this technological idea wasn’t new to our era it was first introduced by Chuck Jordan, an automotive designer back in the ’50s. Our modern vehicles often come standard with a rearview camera to help us see what’s behind us when backing out of the garage or parking spot. In our modern cars, we can open that window up to let the breeze in, which the Centurion didn’t do. Today, we have a variation of that, but it’s only in a portion of the roof. Imagine sitting in those bucket seats and staring upward through the roof and seeing the blue sky or the bright, twinkling stars at night. On top of the vehicle, you see a clear bubble-type dome that was not only for the windows but also for the roof as well. Headrests also donned the top of those seats as another feature people weren’t used to seeing in their everyday cars. They became standard for other vehicles quite a while after that. European vehicles had them since the end of World War II, but America didn’t adopt them until the late ’50s in the sporty-type cars. These seats were virtually unheard of during that time – at least in American cars, which sported bench seats. The Buick Centurion was a four-passenger vehicle that had bucket seats for both the front and the back of the car.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |