In 1955, Packard finally gave in and stopped producing straight eight engines. They introduced a 352 CID, overhead valve V-8 to power their last two years of production. The V-8 was hooked to a new, Two-speed automatic transmission. There were a handful of standard transmission versions of the car produced, some with overdrive.
The Caribbean was a cruiser at heart. Meant to slide smoothly down the new Interstate Highway System being built during the 1950s.
Caribbeans and Packard 400 Sedans featured lots of advanced engineering features like Torsion Level Suspension. Many featured the Wonderbar, a signal seeking tuner on an AM radio. Driving across the Eastern plains of Colorado into Kansas and KOA radio starts to fade in the speaker? Hit the Wonderbar to find a new station. This was a feature that later, car stereo manufacturers like Pioneer would capitalize on in the 1970s.
Some late Packards also featured the Autronic Eye, a pod on the dash that automatically dimmed your bright headlights when it sensed oncoming traffic. Once traffic had passed the Autronic Eye restored the brights. My Mother found this to be a very useful feature when she was first learning to drive.
Packard’s Electronics Division had been sold to GM at about this time, so Cadillacs and Oldsmobiles of 1955 shared these electronic features.
This model has not yet been featured in one of our shoots but one in a different paint scheme is part of, “Ask the Man Who Owns One of These”.
