Bench seat and column shift are unexpected. And why not spring for the factory gauges? http://nashville.craigslist.org/ctd/5505616372.html
Wow, that's pretty nice. My sis had one of those years ago, with the swivel seats. I have seen a bench/column shift in these before..... I can rock that thing.......
Why? Because people were cheap back in the days before the auto companies began selling options as 'packages' in the very late '70s.
Auto companies sold options together in "packages" or "groups" way before the late 70's. The Chevelle gauges were called the "Econominder Gauge Package". It was way cooler to have add-on accessory gauges back then anyway, and they actually worked.
I knew quite a few People that would only own a bench seat for Cruising with there Girl, pre Seat Belt laws. Most loans were 2 or 3 years so you were trying to keep the payments under about $70 a month. And remember more and more cars were ordered by the dealer for "stock" this could have been one of them. They seemed to always have only 1 car available at the "advertised" price. When you went to look at the advertised special it had always "just sold before you came in" It is a good looking car, I just don't like the seat fabric.
I owned a red & white '75 S-3 with red cloth buckets. This was back in the mid-'80s. Had that car for about five days when some jackass hit the quarter panel as he was zipping through a parking lot, doing about 50 mph! Knocked the crap out of the S-3, so I ended up parting that out. Sold that front sheetmetal and swivel seats to a guy building an El Camino, and that turned out nice!
The "Colonnade" styled GM cars in the '70s were really pretty nice! They hid the 5-mph bumpers pretty well, as opposed to their Chrysler and Ford competition. Nice layout, and pretty decent drivers, too; considering the horrendous crap added to the engines to meet EPA nonsense back then.
The great majority of Chevys sold during this period were dealer-stock vehicles, not special-ordered by buyers. My guess is that it was some guy sitting behind a desk at a Chevy dealer who wanted a nice-looking Laguna on the lot, but didn't want the prospective buyer to get sticker-shock. If a buyer wanted the gauges, swivel buckets and floor-shift console, they could order it.
