For 1956, Pontiac carefully refined the all-new package it introduced in 1955, and a young executive was added to the team who would change everything.

Change was in the air at Pontiac for 1956. The styling was given a freshening up with more chrome, and a new body style, a four-door version of the sleek Catalina pillarless hardtop, was added to the lineup. The advanced Pontiac V8, brand-new in 1955, was bumped in displacement from 287 to 316.6 cubic inches, and dual exhaust was made standard for most models. The dual pipes were good for an additional 12.6 horsepower and 14 lb-ft of torque, according to the factory.

Another significant refinement was in the famous Hydra-Matic automatic transmission,  introduced by General Motors in 1940 and first used by Pontiac in 1948. While Hydra-Matic was a big step forward for the auto industry, it wasn’t without some noticeable flaws—among other troubles, it was known for its hard, clunky upshifts in the four forward gears, especially the 1-2 and 2-3 shifts. With the 1956 Pontiac’s Strato-Flight Hydra-Matic, also known as Controlled Coupling Hydra-Matic and Super Hydra-Matic, the front friction-clutch unit was replaced with a second fluid coupling and sprag, reducing the driveline harshness considerably. Pontiac would use this automatic gearbox exclusively through 1960.

All these improvements and more are thoroughly detailed in the nifty factory training movie we feature below. Of course, there was one big change at Pontiac for ’56 that isn’t covered in the film. On July 1 of that year, Pontiac general manager Robert Critchfield was kicked upstairs to an executive engineering position at the new GM Technical Center, and a young Detroit Diesel executive named Semon “Bunkie” Knudsen was placed in charge of the Pontiac brand. At 44, he was the youngest executive to ever head a GM car division, and while he arrived too late to do anything with the ’56 models, he quickly went to work reinventing Pontiac as  GM’s youth and performance brand. Video below.