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1908 — 1919
The car called South Bend: Doyle's register, in its weakest tier — the list of minor names that rest on a single mention — carries an entry for a car called simply "South Bend," of South Bend, Indiana, dated 1919. No company, no specification, no builder and no second account of such a car was found in the standard references or the press reached. The entry is printed here at exactly that size: a name in a register, dated 1919, and nothing behind it that the record reached can stand on. It is not counted among the city's marques.
The Bendix car is not South Bend's: The name Bendix tempts every telling of this city's industry toward a Bendix automobile, and the record places that automobile somewhere else. Vincent Bendix founded his first company at Chicago in 1907 to build "Bendix Motor Buggies"; Doyle's register and the Kimes-derived record alike seat the Bendix Company and its car at Logansport, Indiana, in 1908–1909. The biographical record claims 7,000 of the buggies were built in the venture's two years before it failed — the figure stands here as the claimed figure, from that record. South Bend's Bendix, the components empire of the starter drive and the brake, begins in 1924 and belongs to the Businesses and Inventors sections; its one complete automobile, the secret prototype of 1934, has its own entry below precisely because it was built to exhibit those components. No Bendix production car was ever a South Bend product, and the Logansport correction is printed here so the trap dies in this section too.
Sources:
- Doyle, The World's Automobiles, full text read first-hand (Internet Archive) — the single-mention minor-names listing "'South Bend' (Ind.) 1919," and the register's seating of the Bendix Company at Logansport, 1908–1909.
- The Kimes-derived marque registers — the Bendix automobile carried at Logansport, Indiana, 1908–1909; the biographical record of Vincent Bendix for the Chicago founding of 1907 and the claimed 7,000 motor buggies.