The secret / one-off car — the test, and the Bendix line

One-off literature searched for this ground

Lead: One-off and concept-car literature was searched for a secret or single car built on this ground, and none verifies for New Carlisle, Indiana. No coachbuilt special, prototype, or barn-built single with a New Carlisle, Indiana, origin appears in the ConceptCarz / CoachBuilt-style references or the one-off literature returned by this section's searches. The famous secret car of the county is real, well documented, and not this town's — and it earns exactly a boundary line here. The Bendix SWC of 1934 was a one-of-a-kind, hand-built prototype sedan, designed by Alfred Ney for the Bendix Corporation of South Bend under a dummy company name, the Steel Wheel Corporation, after two and a half years of work at the Bendix Automotive Development Center in Benton Harbor, Michigan, at a reported cost of $84,000: front-wheel drive, a 86-horsepower Continental straight six, four-wheel hydraulic brakes, and independent suspension on rubber blocks.

Its county connection to this ground is storage and testing geography, and even that must be stated exactly. After its European demonstration tour was cut short in 1934 and the project cancelled, the SWC, in the standard account, “ended up in a shed on the South Bend Bendix Proving Grounds,” where it lay for over thirty years until Bendix supervisor Gene Wadzinski found it in 1967; it is now the property of the Studebaker National Museum in South Bend. The Bendix proving ground was the former Studebaker Proving Ground south of New Carlisle — so the secret car's long sleep happened, on the usual telling, on or beside this town's testing ground, while its design, construction, and ownership never did. That is the whole of it: a South Bend corporation's Michigan-built secret, stored at a proving ground near this town, owned by a South Bend museum. Claimed for New Carlisle as anything more, it would be a false marque in a shed. No other one-off attaches to this ground in the literature searched.

Sources:

1. Bendix SWC record (Studebaker National Museum / Hemmings Internationalist tradition, summarized in the SWC reference entry): one-of-a-kind 1934 prototype; Alfred Ney; Steel Wheel Corporation cover name; Benton Harbor development center; $84,000; European tour 1934; storage in a shed on the South Bend Bendix Proving Grounds; found 1967 by Gene Wadzinski; now Studebaker National Museum, South Bend.
2. Mac's Motor City Garage, “The Most Remarkable Car Nobody Ever Heard Of: 1934 Bendix SWC” — corroborating account of secrecy, European tour, and 1967 discovery at the South Bend proving grounds.
3. Web searches, November 2026, for one-off / prototype / concept cars with a New Carlisle, Indiana, origin: none returned.