The Hand-Built Buick Coupe That Had A Touchscreen In 1988

Touchscreen dashboards feel like pure 21st-century car stuff, as they belong next to Teslas, iPads, over-the-air updates, and screens so big they look ready to stream a football game. Yet long before that became normal, one American luxury coupe already let drivers poke a screen to control major cabin functions. In 1988, during the cassette era. When a “cloud” still meant rain.

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UPDATE: 2026/06/18 18:49 EST BY MARTIN P. WAINAINA

We’ve updated this article with more details about this coupe’s corporate sibling.

The strangest part sat on the nose. The badge did not say BMW, Mercedes-Benz, or some Silicon Valley startup that accidentally discovered panel gaps. It said Buick. The car looked like an experiment, came together like a boutique luxury model, and asked traditional buyers to trust a cabin from tomorrow.

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GM Wanted A World-Class Luxury Two-Seater, But Buick Got The Stranger Mission

In the early 1980s, General Motors wanted a specialty two-seater that could give the company a more upscale, image-building car. Buick’s planners saw a gap; a personal luxury machine with European flavor, American comfort, and enough showroom sparkle to make the rest of the brand look like a waiting room with whitewalls. The Mercedes-Benz 380SL sat near the original target zone, while the early Ford Thunderbird offered another kind of two-seat luxury inspiration.

Then corporate politics did what corporate politics do — it moved the fancychair. Buick’s two-seat convertible idea lost the bigger spotlight when GM leadership decided Cadillac needed a Mercedes SL fighter more. That project became the Cadillac Allanté, complete with Pininfarina bodywork and a much louder luxury message. Buick still got a related job, but not the glamorous one.

That created tension before the coupe reached a single dealer. Buick knew comfort, quiet cabins, soft leather, and buyers who did not want their kidneys shuffled on a back road. GM asked Buick to build a car that felt new without scaring loyal customers away. That is a narrow road, and Buick tried to drive it in dress shoes.

This Wasn’t Built Like A Normal Buick, Either

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GM built that coupe at a specialized facility in Lansing, Michigan, called the Reatta Craft Center. Instead of rushing each car down a normal fast-moving line, teams worked on cars at stations, then moved them along to the next stop. The process was described by the media as station-to-station work on computer-guided platforms, and GM created a nine-station workshop for the project.

That made the car feel more boutique than a typical Buick. Not “Italian artisan shaping aluminum over a wooden buck” boutique, but boutique by Detroit standards. Think less “mass-market toaster,” more “GM tried to make a very fancy toaster and gave it a leather manual.” But buyers saw a Buick badge and needed a reason to believe this one deserved special money.

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Underneath, though, the car still used familiar GM bones. It shared a shortened version of the E-body family with the Buick Riviera and used Buick’s 3.8-liter V6. That engine made 165 horsepower in early cars, sent power to the front wheels, and worked through an automatic transmission. The result felt smooth, quiet, and easy to live with, but not sharp like a true sports car.

That contradiction defined the whole car. GM gave it a special build process and a futuristic cabin, then fitted it with a relaxed front-drive layout and a V6 tuned for calm confidence. It could cruise all day and flatter drivers who wanted comfort over drama, but enthusiasts looking for rear-drive balance, big power, or tire smoke found the wrong party. The car dressed like a concept, acted like a grand tourer, and carried a Buick key.

The Buick Reatta Had A Touchscreen Way Before It Was Cool

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The car was the Buick Reatta. Buick produced it from 1988 to 1991 as a low-volume two-seat coupe, later adding a convertible for 1990 and 1991. The early Reatta carried the feature that now gives the car its best dinner-party story – the Electronic Control Center, a CRT touchscreen built into the center stack. Or to put it simply, in 1988, a production Buick had a working touchscreen. That sentence still sounds like a typo.

The screen controlled real things. It handled climate control, radio functions, trip information, and diagnostics. No one should confuse it with a modern capacitive display, though. It was obviously not an iPad with tires. It used old-school CRT hardware, and the graphics had that wonderful “NASA budget cut” look. Still, the concept feels very current. Buick moved several physical controls into one screen-based interface. Modern automakers later built whole interiors around the same idea, then sometimes forgot that people still enjoy finding the fan speed without opening a submenu called “climate journey.”

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The best twist comes from what happened next. The feature that made the Reatta feel alien to some buyers now makes it feel prophetic. Buick even dropped the touchscreen for later models and moved back toward more conventional controls. At the time, the screen looked risky, complex, and maybe too clever. Today, it looks like Buick accidentally previewed the infotainment age while the rest of the industry still had one hand on the equalizer slider.

Too Futuristic For Buick Buyers, But Too Buick For Everyone Else

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The Reatta’s identity crisis could fill a glovebox. It was not a muscle car, not a pure sports car, not a traditional full-size luxury coupe, and not as glamorous as the Cadillac Allanté. Buick basically built a two-seater “the Buick way,” with comfort, quietness, luggage space, and easy driving placed ahead of raw sports-car feel.

That made sense for Buick loyalists, at least on paper. The Reatta had a roomy cabin for two, a useful trunk, a smooth V6, and a ride that didn’t punish passengers for having vertebrae. It also had front-wheel drive, an automatic, and 165 horsepower. For a grand tourer, that formula worked, but for buyers cross-shopping Corvettes, German coupes, or anything with a louder personality, it needed more spice. Buick brought the casserole to a chili cook-off.

Price made the puzzle harder. The 1988 Reatta carried a $25,000 original MSRP, which placed it in serious-car territory for the era. So Buick faced a split room. Older, comfort-focused buyers might have liked the quiet ride but felt less excited about tapping a glowing CRT to change cabin settings. Younger or more performance-minded buyers, in turn, might have admired the tech, then noticed the badge, the V6, and the lack of rear-wheel drive. The Reatta took a lot of engineering effort to serve a very narrow audience. It wanted to be special, but it never made enough people want the same kind of special.

The Reatta Was A Warning From The Future

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Unfortunately, the Reatta did not sell like the image-builder Buick wanted. Total production reached 21,751 units from 1988 to 1991. Roughly 19,314 were coupes, and the rest were convertibles. That makes the car rare now, but not because GM planned a collectible in the exotic-car sense. It became rare because buyers treated it like a strange Buick with a big price and a weird dashboard.

That rarity now actually helps the car. Collectors like cars with a story, and the Reatta has one of the better late-1980s GM stories. It was hand-assembled in a special facility, powered by a durable 3800 V6, packed with strange electronics, and sold by a brand that usually did not traffic in sci-fi coupes. Classic.com currently lists the Reatta’s average sale price around $9,487, with the highest recorded sale at $38,500 for a 1991 convertible.

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That still keeps many Reattas affordable compared with more obvious 1980s and 1990s collector cars. A clean touchscreen coupe offers a lot of conversation per dollar, so to speak. The buyer gets pop-up headlights, low-volume GM oddness, a cabin from an alternate future, and the kind of drivetrain that does not require a séance every time it needs parts. The danger sits in the electronics and Reatta-specific trim, not the basic engine.

The Reatta’s legacy comes down to one great paradox. In 1988, the touchscreen helped make the car feel confusing, and in 2026, that same screen makes it feel weirdly smart. Buick built a coupe for buyers who wanted comfort, then gave it a dashboard from tomorrow. The car missed its moment, but it saw the industry’s future better than most people in the showroom did.

Cadillac’s Allanté Stole The Spotlight Buick Originally Wanted

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Cadillac Allanté Specs

Buick designers began sketching what would become the Reatta as early as 1981, aiming to move Buick’s brand image upstream. However, fearing that a stylish Buick two-seater would steal the spotlight from its flagship luxury brand, the top brass ultimately decided Cadillac would lead the charge against European rivals like the Mercedes-Benz SL, giving birth to the Allanté while pushing Buick’s project into a more modest role. Both cars shared a front-wheel-drive layout and served as luxury halo vehicles for their respective brands, but from the moment they were approved, the two programs operated in completely different worlds.

The Allanté was designed as Cadillac’s international luxury flagship, and GM spared little expense trying to make it one. The company partnered with legendary Italian design house Pininfarina, which built the Allanté’s bodies in Turin before shipping them to the United States for final assembly. The logistics were so complicated that specially equipped Boeing 747s made regular trips across the Atlantic carrying partially completed bodies. The process became one of the most ambitious manufacturing experiments in GM history, but it also added enormous costs to every car produced.

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That exotic manufacturing process helped explain the Allanté’s eye-watering price. A 1987 model started at more than $54,000, putting it squarely in Mercedes-Benz territory. Buyers received a sophisticated roadster with Italian styling, premium materials, and eventually Cadillac’s 4.5-liter and 4.6-liter V8 engines producing up to 295 horsepower in later models. The Reatta, by comparison, relied on Buick’s proven 3.8-liter V6 and started at less than half the price. The result was two cars pursuing similar goals through very different means. The Allanté offered European-style exclusivity and prestige, while the Reatta focused on innovation, practicality, and value. The touchscreen was exclusive to the Buick, though.

The Reatta Predicted A Screen-Filled Future

Mercedes-Benz

What looked strange in 1988 is now industry standard. Modern vehicles have adopted touchscreens so much that many enthusiasts now believe it’s too much. Cars like the Tesla Model S and Model 3 rely on a central touchscreen for nearly every major function, from climate control to opening the glovebox. BMW’s latest 7 Series adds a massive 31-inch Theater Screen for rear passengers, while the Mercedes-Benz EQS features the dashboard-wide Hyperscreen.

The Reatta’s CRT touchscreen may seem primitive today, but its core idea — consolidating vehicle controls into a screen-based interface — foreshadowed the direction much of the industry would eventually take.

Source: Buick, Classic.com,