Produced in East Germany under the directive of the Socialist government especially for the local market, the Trabant Sputnik was the epitome of Eastern bloc arrogance on four wheels. Steel was in extremely short supply in East Germany at the time (1957), forcing the Trabant’s engineers to search for a substitute. Working with the materials at hand, they came up with a miracle substance they called Duroplast—made from wood pulp, sheep’s wool, and tree sap—which was molded into cardboard panels to form the body of the car.Beneath the car’s surface, things were even worse. The engine, a tiny two-stroke model similar to a moped engine, made up for its pitiful weakness by spewing such an astounding quantity of foul-smelling exhaust that West Germany forbade ownership of the Trabant, and when Car and Driver magazine imported one into the United States to test it, the Environmental Protection Agency wouldn’t let them operate it on public streets.
Coop found some great videos of the production line inside the Trabant Factory. He says, “Be sure to watch the second video (below), where a mullet-clad East German assembly line worker aligns the hood with the body by repeatedly kicking the grille! What a country, as a pre-Glasnost Yakov Smirnov would say…”
[Boing Boing]
Construction of the Trabant
Fine Tuning of a Trabant
These have got to be the crappiest made… looking… designed…. cars I’ve ever seen. I had heard that the cars where terrible, and in fact they where being demolished by the thousands when the wall came down. I also remember the story in Popular Mechanics when they talked about getting one. The bad part was that even though they where incredibly bad… people had to wait in lists to be able to get one. And then only if you had the permission to get one. For more information go ahead and read the Wikipedia Article.
Tags: Automobile, History, Interesting, Video
I had the ‘wonerful’ experience of visiting East Berlin in the 80′s. It was like being in an alternate universe. Trabis were everywhere and the whole place sounded like a lawnmower rally. One also imagine the old “Autopia’ at Disneyland multiplied by a thousand.