The Brilliant White Steering Wheels Of The 1940s To create those gleaming white steering wheels in the 1940s, automakers had to reject the era's most popular plastic and turn to a chemical invented by a camera film company. The material they chose was cellulose acetate butyrate (CAB), known commercially as Tenite II, and it solved a major manufacturing problem for designers trying to build elegant interiors. During the 1930s and 40s, car designers wanted to move away from heavy wooden steering wheels to materials that matched the colorful Art Deco dashboards of the era. The most famous plastic of the time was Bakelite, a phenolic resin that was incredibly strong and heavily used for under-hood automotive parts like distributor caps. However, Bakelite had a fatal aesthetic flaw: the fillers used to strengthen it meant it could only be produced in dark, muddy colors like black or brown. A creamy Tenite steering wheel inside a 1941 Cadillac Series 62.