Industry News
“World’s worst car” celebrates 50th anniversary
22nd Febuary 2007
The Trabant, the two-stroke, vegetable fibre-bodied transport icon for privileged East Germans before its maker collapsed after the fall of the Berlin Wall, is celebrating its 50th birthday, and east Germans including members of over 80 local owners’ clubs are preparing for a year of ‘nostalgic road pollution’, Roger Boye of The Times reported yesterday. Except in Berlin, where the authorities have banned the car for its outstanding non-air quality-enhancing performance.
A contemporary of the USSR’s first Sputnik, the diminutive Trabant was first produced in 1957, and survived in production for 14 years as the East German regime’s nearest equivalent to the VW Beetle. But unlike its local, larger rival two-stroke, the Wartburg, ithe Trabant failed to win even limited traction in Western export markets. The Trabant had no fuel pump or gauge, and no oil filter. Due to a shortage of steel, its body was made from compressed cotton waste bonded with a phenol-based resin. A plan to use compressed cardboard reportedly foundered after a prototype was left out in the rain and became the ‘first soggy car in history’.
The Times ended its report yesterday with a string of Trabi jokes – many of which in past incarnations were attached to Skoda, another former Soviet bloc brand, whose image under VW’s ownership has since been transformed to the extent that even its UK advertising agency has ceased to present its new models in ironic, “Honest, it’s a Skoda” fashion.
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