New vehicle safety standards in the USA came into affect in 1967, and other countries soon started to follow the lead of the USA. As a result of the new standards radical changes had to be made to the cars to meet the new requirements. One of the biggest problems was designing dashboards to meet the new standards. Dashboards now had to be deformable upon impact, and significantly reduce glare in the driver's field of vision. This meant that any highly polished chrome on the dash was now banned, as was glass. Instruments had to be recessed, and even the timber finish on the dash had to be dull. All this had a catastrophic affect on the appearence of dashboards. Gone were the ornate timber and chrome dashboards of the earlier Cedrics, and in their place was a sea of dull black plastic. Nissan didn't do too bad a job of the safety dash on the Mark 4 130s, some other car makers at this time made some truly horrible dashes, at least the Cedric dash had a bit of style about it. The dash itself had dull fake timber inserts and a wide and short recessed instrument binnacle.
