The Oldest Street Driven VW Bus! 1950 SÜDFUNK Barndoor Bus Hot VWs Magazine 

Thanks, Lind Bjornsen (@ZVWBUS), our Transporter Talk column contributor, for sharing a story of this one of the earliest VW Buses.
Prototypes showed up in 1949, and production started in early 1950. By the middle of that first summer, things were rolling along nicely, with an average production of over 30 Buses per day. By the end of the first year, over 8,000 Type 2s had been produced. Less than 50 of those are known to exist today. The early 1950 models (around the first 5000 units) have a stand-up spare tire next to the engine and a rear emblem. Their late 1950 counterparts (the next approximately 3000 units) have the spare tire tray above the engine and just a blank panel on the back with no emblem. The rear window would not show until four months into ’51, which was another 4500 or so Buses. A couple dozen of these early ’51s are also known to exist, and they are pretty much the same as late ’50 models. The incredibly low survival rate of less than 1% of these early no-rear-window Buses probably has a lot to do with the fact that they were workhorses. In other words, they were mostly sold in Germany at a time when cars were in high demand and tended to live a hard life.
The known history of Bus No. 20-05909 starts with the Südfunk radio manufacturer, who had signwriting logos painted to make it a rolling billboard for their company. In 1964, a Porsche dealer named Vasek Polak from Manhattan Beach, California, made his annual trek to Stuttgart and Zuffenhausen to visit the Porsche factory. Vasek would usually buy a cheap old VW Transporter, and fill it with Porsche racing engines and race parts; then ship the improvised Bus-container to his dealership. Heavily involved in racing, Vasek was known to be a top tuner for four-cam engines in his day; even the factory team would have him tune their Spyders when racing in on the west coast. Once the Bus was in California, Vasek's shop boy, Ralph Jackson, unloaded all the parts from the packed Bus, including 4-cam flat-fours, and an early 6-cylinder engine. Ralph asked Vasek what he was going to do with the Bus and Vasek said he was going to junk it. So, Ralph bought it for $50, thereby saving the ancient VW.
For more detail about this incredible piece of VW history, check it our hotVWs Magazine Aug 2021 issue.
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