Sussan Ley may be the first woman to drive the Australian Liberal Party, but the 63-year-old politician’s first car is a surprising choice.
While most politicians are used to travelling in government fleet vehicles, it’s easy to forget they were once regular citizens who used normal vehicles to get around town.
In the case of Sussan Ley, the first woman to lead the Australian Liberal Party in its 80-year history, her first car is an unexpected gem.
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The 63-year-old politician took to the social media platform Instagram in May 2024 to showcase her first daily driver, a 1955 Volkswagen Beetle in a duck egg blue colourway.
According to Ley’s post, she was hit with nostalgia after seeing the same model at the Depot Historic Collection in Deniliquin, New South Wales. However, a spokesperson for The Depot Museum confirmed the actual model on display doesn’t actually belong to the politician.
The specific Volkswagen Beetle on display at the family-owned museum was purchased at auction, where the previous owner restored the hatch while maintaining all original materials, excluding the engine – which has been replaced by a different motor from a later, unspecified Beetle model.
The iconic VW has also been a favourite companion to a range of celebrities like German supermodel Heidi Klum, renowned former TV show host and car enthusiast Jay Leno, and legendary comedian Jerry Seinfeld.
Interestingly, Seinfeld also owned a similar 1955 Volkswagen Beetle as Ley, but sold it at auction in August 2024.
According to the US auction house, Bring a Trailer, Seinfeld owned the pint-sized icon sometime in 2016, with the comedian’s Beetle selling for $US43,851 ($AUD68,485).
The Volkswagen Beetle has had an interesting history in Australia. According to the German car maker, the pint-sized hatch grew in popularity thanks to Karl Regel, a German migrant who moved to Sydney, New South Wales sometime in the early 1950s.
Volkswagen claimed that Regel imported a right-hand-drive version of the Beetle that was built at the car maker’s factory in Stuttgart, Germany.
Regel’s example was so important to the German marque’s Australian history that it has been immortalised and put on display at Volkswagen’s headquarters in Chullora, NSW.
You might be surprised to know Volkswagen once built the Beetle at its factory in Clayton, Victoria – but local manufacturing would only last between 1962–1968 before it stopped.
Despite changing the automotive world with its humble size and consumer-friendly options, ironically it was the shift in the industry and buyer behaviour that led to dwindling sales and the inevitable demise of the ‘original’ Beetle, which ceased production in Mexico in 2003.
The ‘new’ Volkswagen Beetle (based on the Volkswagen Golf) was launched in 1997 and updated in 2011.
As previously reported by Drive, Volkswagen culled the Beetle nameplate in Australia in 2017, with only 53 ‘Final Edition’ Beetle examples coming to the land Down Under.
After nearly building 21.4 million Type 1 Beetles globally, the last Volkswagen Beetle – in a ‘Denim Blue’ colourway – rolled off production lines at the German car maker’s Mexico facilities in July 2003, where it became a part of the company’s museum in Puebla to commemorate a “lasting tribute to the automobile’s rich and storied heritage”.
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