One unbeatable feature of Trabant was that it cost only around $5000 in today's money.
It also seems quite capable: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3WRQcJ0QnTU
Trabant: The East German car remains iconic
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Re: Trabant: The East German car remains iconic
#42I wonder when we'll see retro-designs of these, i.e. like the modern Mini and the Bumblebee. One model I'm still missing is the 2CV. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citro%C3%ABn_2CV
There was a "newTrabi" concept making the rounds a little while ago, but nothing came of it:
https://www.conceptcarz.com/vehicle/z17483/trabant-nt-concep...
Re: Trabant: The East German car remains iconic
#43I'm Hungarian, born in '81, so I grew up around Trabis, Wartburgs, Skodas, Moskvitch, Ladas. My mom's first car was a Trabant. At some point in the 80s we moved to W-Germany for a few years and we took the Trabant, it was not a good look (we were living in Boeblingen, near Stuttgart, location of the Porsche HQ). The magic of social and geographic mobility and the tech boom: today, 30 years later, I live in Dubai, whe…
> we were living in Boeblingen, near Stuttgart Grew up in Herrenberg (a few kilometers from Böblingen). When neighbors learned that my father was thinking of replacing his old Audi someone put a Mercedes calendar on our doorstep. Swabians are very particular with their cars.
My father grew up in Herrenberg (on "Auf'm Bildkäppele") and has never driven anything but Mercedes.
Re: Trabant: The East German car remains iconic
#44In the mid 90s my parents and me were having a 2-day trip from eastern part of Germany to Paris in a "Trabbi". It was loud as hell inside the car. And still, I don't know why, I really liked this trip and like the look of this car a lot.
Re: Trabant: The East German car remains iconic
#45I'm from West-Germany and have driven a Trabant myself (only twice though). This video, titled "The Trabant Was an Awful Car Made By Communists" from Doug De Muro sums it up quite nicely imo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=No1-4GsQa-g ;-) The fact that they still sold this dangerous and noisy contraption in the late eighties (you even had to wait years to get one), when Audi released the V8 (4C) and Mercedes was abo…
I think it's worth appreciating the resource constraints under which the Trabant was developed. The questionable technical choices weren't made out of socialist incompetence but because certain materials were hard to come by and practically every citizen was eligible to request one.
While the Western Allies quickly changed their post-war plans to build up Germany as a military base against the Soviet Union for the impending Cold War and the US offered Germany loans for their surplus resources, the Soviet Union initially sought to deindustrialize Germany for reparations to rebuild its own infrastructure that had faced massive destruction by Germany throughout the war.
Additionally unlike the Western Allies, the Soviet Union had only just barely experienced its own industrial revolution and was still largely agrarian until it shifted gears to produce for war. And while an important strategic partner, East Germany spent most of its existence as a puppet state, stuck between producing commodities for its own population, producing export goods that could only be sold at a massive loss and supporting the Soviet side of the Cold War while facing constant provocations from NATO and the US.
In fact, the most valuable "export" for East Germany were West German spies and "collaborators", whom the West German government routinely paid large ransoms for.
EDIT: Deleted the last paragraph speculating about what might have happened if East Germany had continued to exist because that's probably off-topic and requires a more thorough understanding of late East German politics.
EDIT2: To clarify, I'm mostly pointing these things out because the video the parent posted is infuriatingly light on details while just constantly mocking obvious UX or quality issues. The presenter doesn't seem to know much about the car itself and instead tries to give a strained Jeremy Clarkson impression. There's no historical context given (other than "it's a communist car") and it barely even describes any technical aspects other than what would be obvious to any layperson. Contrast this with this Forgotten Weapons video about a horrible mess of a gun that ruined the company that made it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9bULArrKs4
Re: Trabant: The East German car remains iconic
#46I wonder when we'll see retro-designs of these, i.e. like the modern Mini and the Bumblebee. One model I'm still missing is the 2CV. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citro%C3%ABn_2CV
I’ve seen this project ages ago a it’s apparently dead now: https://m.facebook.com/NewWarsaw
Re: Trabant: The East German car remains iconic
#47One unbeatable feature of Trabant was that it cost only around $5000 in today's money. It also seems quite capable: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3WRQcJ0QnTU
Wikipedia says there was a 10 year wait list? Seems worth mentioning when discussing the purchase price.
Re: Trabant: The East German car remains iconic
#48I'm from West-Germany and have driven a Trabant myself (only twice though). This video, titled "The Trabant Was an Awful Car Made By Communists" from Doug De Muro sums it up quite nicely imo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=No1-4GsQa-g ;-) The fact that they still sold this dangerous and noisy contraption in the late eighties (you even had to wait years to get one), when Audi released the V8 (4C) and Mercedes was abo…
I think it's worth appreciating the resource constraints under which the Trabant was developed. The questionable technical choices weren't made out of socialist incompetence but because certain materials were hard to come by and practically every citizen was eligible to request one. While the Western Allies quickly changed their post-war plans to build up Germany as a military base against the Soviet Union for the im…
"Constant provocations from NATO and the US"? The following wiki article goes into great depth on the insane amount of time and money the DDR invested in making sure that its citizens could not escape:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortifications_of_the_inner_Ge...
Re: Trabant: The East German car remains iconic
#49In early 2000s in Poland, we had a Trabant combi in our family, from the last 1990-91 batch (with a 4-stroke VW Polo 1.1L engine). Apart from funny look, I remember it as a much better and more solid car than other cars available at that price range at the time! Plus, few of cheap cars back then had a spacious combi version. (Other, much popular low-end cars back then being trunk-less Fiat 126p, and Fiat Cinquecento/Seicento)
Re: Trabant: The East German car remains iconic
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think it's worth appreciating the resource constraints under which the Trabant was developed. The questionable technical choices weren't made out of socialist incompetence but because certain materials were hard to come by and practically every citizen was eligible to request one. While the Western Allies quickly changed their post-war plans to build up Germany as a military base against the Soviet Union for the im…
"Constant provocations from NATO and the US"? The following wiki article goes into great depth on the insane amount of time and money the DDR invested in making sure that its citizens could not escape: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortifications_of_the_inner_Ge...
Oh, sorry, I meant "unannounced military drills occasionally violating Soviet airspace and waters".
I'm not sure what the fact that the DDR was an authoritarian police state that routinely incarcerated and tortured citizens accused of collaboration, shot anyone trying to illegally cross the border into the West, and employed ordinary citizens to keep taps on each other under constant paranoia of collaboration has to do with this, though. There's a reason I put "collaborators" in scare quotes. These things are well-known, even outside Germany.
I didn't say the DDR was good. I said it faced extreme resource constraints and that it was under constant pressure from Moscow, while also trying to provide commodity goods to every citizen. "Stupid communists built bad cars" isn't a very interesting or informed take, though.