In a parallel universe, the Bendix SWC could have upset the entire auto industry. But it was not to be.

Great fortunes were made  in the early decades of the auto industry, and one of the greater ones was built by Victor Bendix (1881-1945), inventor of the Bendix starter drive. Patented in 1914 and used on millions of cars, its success allowed Bendix to develop more products and acquire more companies, and in 1929, the multiple enterprises were combined to form the Bendix Aviation Corporation. General Motors acquired a 24 percent interest and took several seats on the board—mainly, it was said, to keep up with all the impressive Bendix developments.

Not content to be one of the industry’s major suppliers, Bendix sought to be an automobile manufacturer himself. Or so it would appear when he set up a phantom company, the Steel Wheel Corporation, to perform the development work on a production automobile of highly advanced design. To obscure the car’s Bendix origin, the badges on the first prototype car bore the mysterious intials SWC with the three letters intertwined.

SWC engine and front-drive unit. Photo courtesy of Special Interest Autos Nov/Dec 1971

The design team included Bendix himself, vice president of enginnering Victor Kliesrath, his associate Alfred Ney, and stylist William Ortwig. They produced an exuberance of innovations for the prototype, including front-wheel drive and four-wheel-independent suspension with rubber-block springs. The original plan called for unitized body/frame construction, but to save time the first car was built on a somewhat more conventional stub-frame chassis. Off-the-shelf Bendix products included Startix, Bendix-Weiss constant-velocity universal joints, and Fingertip Control preselector gearshift (see our feature here).

The SWC was powered by a standard 169.5 CID Continental L-head six rated at 86 hp, but reversed in the chassis to facilitate front-wheel drive and isolated on rubber blocks. The engine also featured a novel latent-heat cooling system with a special aluminum cylinder head and hotbox mounted on top, finished off with a polished aluminum cover to mimic the appearance of an overhead-valve engine.

Ortwig’s streamlined styling bore a strong resemblance to the Chrysler Airflow, a car he couldn’t have seen at the time. But as the project ran out of time and well over budget, in the end the grille and headlamps from a production 1934 DeSoto Airflow were adapted to the SWC’s front end, further obscuring the car’s identity. Reportedly, total development cost ran to nearly $85,000, roughly $2,000,000 today.

SWC three-speed gearset and worm-gear final drive. Photo courtesy of Special Interest Autos Nov/Dec 1971.

Upon completion and testing, the SWC was shipped to Europe late in 1934 in the hope of finding a manufacturing partner there. But the experimental car—grossly overweight, as it turned out—was plagued with bugs in the constant-velocity joints and rubber suspension, and there were no takers. The car was shipped back home, and it was at about this time that the Bendix board of directors, including the GM members, grew fed up with the founder’s freewheeling business methods and went to work ousting Victor Bendix from his own company.

That was the end of the SWC story until more than three decades later, when in 1967 a Bendix supervisor named Gene Wadzinski discovered the lone prototype resting in a shed at the company’s South Bend, Indiana proving grounds. He repaired the suspension and performed a cosmetic restoration on his own time, and ultimately the car was donated to the Studebaker National Museum in South Bend, where you can see it today.