When the Berlin Wall fell in November 1989 one of the enduring images was of a line of these cars, all emitting their characteristic blue smelly exhaust fumes from their two-stroke motors, waiting to get into the West. A plastic car with the petrol tank on top of the engine, but no petrol gauge! It breached so many EU regulations that production ceased on 30 April 1991.
Needless to say it is another entry on
Time magazines 50 All-time Worst Cars list: "This is the car that gave Communism a bad name. Powered by a two-stroke pollution generator that maxed out at an ear-splitting 18 hp, the Trabant was a hollow lie of a car constructed of recycled worthlessness (actually, the body was made of a fiberglass-like Duroplast, reinforced with recycled fibers like cotton and wood). A virtual antique when it was designed in the 1950s, the Trabant was East Germany's answer to the VW Beetle — a "people's car," as if the people didn't have enough to worry about. Trabants smoked like an Iraqi oil fire, when they ran at all, and often lacked even the most basic of amenities, like brake lights or turn signals. But history has been kind to the Trabi. Thousands of East Germans drove their Trabants over the border when the Wall fell, which made it a kind of automotive liberator. Once across the border, the none-too-sentimental Ostdeutschlanders immediately abandoned their cars. Ich bin Junk!"
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| the size of a communist prison cell? |
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| a less polluting use for a Trabi in Bulgaria |
to be continued...
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