1966 Chevelle Regular Equipment - Interior

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1966 Bench vs. Bucket Seats

There are a lot of people that think all SS396 Chevelles came with bucket seats. Not true. Beginning in 1966 ALL Chevelles came standard with bench seats. You'll often see ads for RARE BENCH SEAT CAR, this is baloney. Nothing rare about a bench seat Malibu or SS396.

Let's look at some figures. Sadly Chevrolet did not give a breakdown of series and/or body styles for ANY of the options available although some, such as a power convertible top, would only apply to one or two specific models. Even in this case there's no way to know how many SS396 convertibles came with a power convertible top compared to Malibu convertibles.

So how can one 'guestimate' the number of any particular option in any particular year? One can calculate an evenly spread distribution by taking a given series/body style and finding its percentage of the total number of cars possible for a given option. We'll take bucket seats (RPO A51) as an example. It's known Chevrolet sold 95,482 A51 options in 1966.

There were 5 possible series and/or body styles that could order the A51 bucket seats, the Malibu sport coupe, the Malibu convertible, the Malibu pickup (Custom El Camino), the SS396 sport coupe and the SS396 convertible. Adding up the production number of these 5 series and body styles gives you 270,975 possibilities for bucket seats to be optioned.

The next step is to calculate the percentage of a specific body style of the total possibilities. Using the SS396 sport coupe as an example, there were 66,843 SS396 sport coupes sold in 1966. This 66,843 SS396 sport coupes number is about 24.67% of the total 270,975 bucket seat possibilities. One then takes this 24.67% of the total bucket seat options sold (95,482) and comes up with 23,553 SS396 sport coupes with bucket seats - and leaving 43,290 SS396 sport coupes with the standard bench seat. Is this a correct, known amount? Certainly not. It's simply a mathematical distribution of the bucket seats sold in 1966. It's probably true that more SS396 sport coupes and SS396 convertibles were sold with bucket seats than their calculated numbers show but that's something nobody will ever know unless they find ALL of Chevrolet's records for 1966 and every option sold with every car and crunches the numbers...something that will in all likelihood never happen. Even if the number of bucket seat options is larger than those calculated, a RARE BENCH SEAT CAR is far from being rare and more likely it's the norm for all of these series/body styles to have been ordered with the standard bench seat.

The table below gives the breakdown (and calculated figures) for the 5 possible series/body styles and bucket seats. Remember there were 95,482 RPO A51 bucket seat options sold in 1966 and 270,975 possible series/body styles the option could be ordered in.

The above methodology could be used for any single option.
1.  Find the total number of series/body styles an option could be ordered with.
2.  Calculate the individual series/body style percentage of the total possible.
3.  Multiply this percentage by the total number of the particular option.

Naturally combining any two or more options only dilutes the calculations further.