History
This is a classic barn find story. This 220SE sedan had its last drive in December 1986, when it was driven into a carport and parked up after the registration ran out, with the previous owner intending to give it a refresh. He started pulling the car apart but got distracted with his business and then lost interest in the car altogether. I stumbled across the car in his carport when l attended to a fallen pine tree over the roof of his house (l’m a VICSES volunteer). It turned out he didn’t have insurance or the funds to get the tree professionally removed, so l made a deal that l would spend a number of weekends clearing the huge tree off his roof and the 220SE would be payment.
As it turns out, after getting the 220SE home and checking over the chassis and engine numbers, only 1,974 sedans were manufactured between 1958 and 1960, and 18 of those were imported to Australia as complete knock down (CKD) kits and assembled in Port Melbourne, with my 220SE being one of those imports. How's that for a bit of Australian motoring history!
This 220SE sedan was quite advanced and featured some world first technology/engineering features such as fuel injection, sub frame body and fully independent suspension.
