Seat 1400-A. Black version
The SEAT 1400 was a rear-wheel-drive four-door mid-size sedan built by the Spanish car maker SEAT between 1953 and 1963. It was the first model produced by SEAT, and the first car to be assembled at the firm’s then-new plant located in Barcelona’s Zona Franca zone.
The car was a rebranded Fiat 1400, itself Fiat’s first integrated chassis model.
Production started on November 13, 1953, carried out by an early workforce of 925 employees with a potential of 5 units produced per day; the first example rolled off the assembly line with the licence plate ‘B-87.223’. Initially, components were shipped as CKD kits from Italy and assembled by SEAT at their plant in Zona Franca, but in 1954 the Spanish-made parts content rose to a 93% proportion of the total in order to limit imports and to help the development of the almost non-existent Spanish supplier industry, thus fulfilling SEAT’s assigned key role in the development of the Spanish economy as the national car maker of the post World War II Spain.
In the next few years the model’s production output would gradually increase, and by 1956 10,000 cars would be produced annually, with an average of 42 cars per day.
In 1963, when the car was replaced by the SEAT 1500, 82,894 examples covering four distinctively different versions of the 1400 had been produced.
The first SEAT 1400, offered between 1953 and 1955, incorporated a 1395 cc four-cylinder water-cooled Fiat engine with a claimed output of 44 bhp and top speed of 120 km/h (75 mph).
Model of the 1956
Engine: 1395 cc; 4 cylinders
Power: 50 HP
Max. speed: 125 km/h
