Ruxton Cars Spotters Guide

1930 Ruxton

While the Ruxton may have played second fiddle in many aspects to rival Cord – the latter beat it to market, sold more examples, and has certainly been the subject of more articles and attention in the ensuing years – the front-wheel-drive also-ran at least had its distinctive multi-hue banded color schemes going for it.

Developed at roughly the same time as Cord’s pioneering front-wheel-drive L-29, the Ruxton also took its inspiration from the success of Harry Miller’s front-wheel-drive race cars, which began to make a splash at Indy and throughout the racing world in the latter half of the 1920s. Where Cord simply bought Miller’s – and later, Van Ranst’s – front-wheel-drive transaxle patent rights, however, the Ruxton’s gestation proved more difficult.

Many, but not all, Ruxtons featured the cat-like Woodlight headlights; while sleek, their performance paled in comparison to normal headlights. Most Ruxton owners soon learned that they either drove their cars during the daylight, or had them retrofitted with normal headlights or auxiliary driving lights.

It began, more or less, with Bill Muller, a development engineer for Budd in Philadelphia. Around 1926, he began to investigate the idea of a front-wheel-drive passenger car and, with Budd’s support, a couple years later built a running prototype that used a Studebaker engine, Warner four-speed transmission, and de Dion front axle running through Weiss constant-velocity joints. Crude as it was, it ran, and Budd body engineer Joseph Ledwinka modified a Wolseley sedan body to fit it. Budd, however, only intended on supplying the body and concept to another company, which would then assemble and market the car, and one of Budd’s directors, Archie Andrews, tried pitching it to a number of carmakers, including Peerless, Hupmobile, and Gardner. Rebuffed by each, he and Muller then decided to form a company, New Era Motors, and build the car themselves.

Among those on the board of directors were William Ruxton, who Andrews named the car after, and Childe Harold Wills, who would help Muller develop an improved transaxle that would both shorten the lengthy drivetrain by more than a foot and allow the Ruxton to achieve a much better front/rear weight distribution than the L-29. Andrews announced the Ruxton in spring 1929 and promised that production would begin that July, but Muller wouldn’t finish the first Ruxton Model A prototype until August, right around the same time the Cord L-29 entered production.

All along, Andrews had to figure out exactly how New Era Motors would build the Ruxton. Budd would of course supply the bodies, and the Ruxton would use a Continental straight-eight engine, but New Era didn’t have any production facilities of its own. So Andrews, who made his millions leveraging buyouts of marginal car companies, bought up Moon of St. Louis and persuaded the company to build the Ruxton; as a fallback, he also convinced Hartford, Wisconsin’s Kissel to chip in.

Ruxton production did begin in June 1930, and Andrews recruited Broadway set designer Josef Urban to design eye-catching paint schemes for Ruxton’s show cars, schemes that used horizontal bands of varying colors, usually in a gradation pattern, to emphasize both its length and its lowness, the latter a chief selling point of the car. Though hampered by the tough economic climate, the Ruxton did find buyers – either somewhere around 300 or 500, depending on the source – and some even preferred it over the larger and heavier Cord L-29. Michael Lamm, in comparing the two for Special Interest Autos #128, March 1992, noted that the Ruxton “takes a noticeably lighter touch, it’s at least as responsive, much easier to drive, and while its styling isn’t quite so sophisticated and well wrought as the L-29′s, it’s still quite an impressive, harmonious job of design.” In fact, Ruxton production came to a halt in November 1930 not because of the car itself, but because both Moon and Kissel went out of business.