You’re cruising down a Victorian motorway. You peer over at the passenger in the car next to you. A pair of cold, dead eyes stare back at you. You’re not going crazy – there’s a perfectly good explanation.
It just so happens a sex doll named Donna has completely sold out in Melbourne for the first time ever, as the city’s commuters come up with a creative solution to their traffic woes.
According to Adam Lea, marketing manager of Wild Secrets, the adult retailer that stocks the $5,500 doll: “This has never happened in the company’s 30-year history.”
The sudden demand for Donna has been sparked by Eastern Freeway commuters who are using the lifelike doll as a fake passenger to qualify for the faster transit lane.
“The awful traffic on the Eastern has resulted in a coup for us,” Mr Lea told the Herald Sun.
“People are buying dolls so they can use the much faster transit lane.”
Apparently, people were inspired by a promotional image of Donna seated behind the wheel of a car, and one customer even admitted that transit lane travel was the sole reason for his doll purchase.
Until recently, the “niche market” sex dolls sold “pretty infrequently” – some months, only two dolls would sell, Mr Lea said.
However, in the past few months, hourly sales of Donna have taken over, leading to a complete sellout.
While VicRoads strictly prohibits the use of sex dolls in transit lanes, with its website stating that “passengers” must be human, Melbourne commuters seem to have found a way around the system, much to the delight of Donna’s manufacturers.
“Anyone else seeing people travelling in Eastern transit lane with dolls?” one Melbourne driver shared in a viral post on Reddit alongside an image showing a lifelike doll in the passenger seat of a car next to them.
While many praised the driver for finding a way to cheat the system, some suggested he might have been in a relationship with the doll.
“This might sound weird but I’m pretty sure it’s a sex doll, they have a whole forum/community and everything,” wrote one user.
“They treat the dolls like real life people and take them on holiday trips etc. Travel with them in the car and so on.”
But this isn’t a new method to circumvent the rules. And it isn’t limited to Melbourne.
In 2019 it was reported that drivers in several US states, including New York, California and Florida, were using mannequins, skeletons and blow-up sex dolls to illegally use carpool lanes to beat traffic.
Police said that the issue had reached alarming proportions and that they were fighting back with tactics such as public shaming on social media and creating dedicated police units to patrol highways.
In 2022, one driver in Arizona was given a traffic citation after being pulled over for driving in a carpool lane with an inflatable Grinch in the front passenger seat.