Buick Century

The Buick Century is one of 83 Buick models in the MotorJury library, the catalogue that sets out to hold every car ever made — production, prototype and concept alike. The record places its introduction in 1936. The photography on this page is hotlinked from Wikimedia Commons under an open licence, with the photographer credited on every frame.

The era it was born into

To read the Buick Century properly it helps to place it in its decade. The 1930s were the streamline decade, when aerodynamics entered body design, independent suspension spread, and grand-prix engineering began flowing into road cars even as the Depression thinned the industry. Any car launched into that world was shaped by it — by what materials, engineering and regulation allowed, and by what buyers of the day demanded. Its direct contemporaries in this catalogue, introduced within three years of it, include the Volkswagen Volkswagen Beetle, the Bugatti Bugatti Type 57, the Chevrolet Chevrolet Suburban — the cars a buyer of the period would actually have cross-shopped.

The numbers, read closely

On paper, the Buick Century reads like this: the record lists its engine as 331.4 cuin Buick Straight-6 engine OHV I6 / 220.7 cuin Buick Straight-8 engine OHV I8 / 230.4 cuin Buick Straight-8 engine OHV I8 / 278 cuin Buick Straight-8 engine OHV I8; drive goes through 3-speed synchromesh manual; the layout is FR layout (1936–1981) / Front-engine, front-wheel-drive layout / Transverse front-engine, front-wheel drive (1982–2005). Every figure above is a manufacturer specification carried by the Wikipedia infobox or the open Wikidata record for this model — nothing on this page is estimated, and where a source is silent the row simply does not appear.

Its place in the Buick story

Within Buick's own catalogue the Buick Century sits alongside the Buick Avenir, the Buick Electra E5, the Buick Excelle GX, the Buick GL6. The record names the Buick Master Six as its predecessor and the Buick LaCrosse (2005–2009) / Buick Regal#Regal TourX / Buick Regal TourX as its successor, fixing its place in the model line's chronology. Design is credited to Harley Earl. Assembly is recorded at Buick City, Flint, Michigan, United States.

How this catalogue works

This library is generated, verified and rebuilt from the open record on every deploy. The catalogue skeleton comes from Wikidata, specifications from Wikipedia's infoboxes under CC BY-SA, photography from Wikimedia Commons under each file's own licence, and the ownership data from United States federal safety records. Nothing is written by hand and nothing is invented: every fact on this page traces to a public source, and every page is rebuilt nightly as those sources improve. Errors in the source record will appear here too — and disappear the night the source is corrected.

Why concepts and prototypes are in the library

Most car databases stop at series production. This one deliberately does not, because concept cars, racing specials and cancelled prototypes are where the industry thinks out loud — the ideas tested in public years before they reach a showroom. Holding them beside the production cars they inspired makes the lineage legible: nearly every landmark road car in this library has a concept ancestor somewhere in the catalogue, and the connections run through the era links on every page.

From catalogue to ownership

What this page cannot yet tell you is what the Buick Century costs to live with — that is a different dataset. MotorJury's ownership verdicts are computed from federal complaint and recall records plus EPA economy data, published per model year as the nightly ingest reaches each car. If this model was sold in the United States, its years will surface in the ownership database; browse it live or price any car yourself with the true-cost calculator.