What's new
  • ICMag with help from Landrace Warden and The Vault is running a NEW contest in November! You can check it here. Prizes are seeds & forum premium access. Come join in!

Old Trabants still chugging along in Germany

naga_sadu

Active member
It was East Germany's answer to the Volkswagen: cheap, agonisingly slow and notoriously unreliable.

The Trabant can still be seen on Germany's roads - a stubborn survivor of the defunct communist regime.

Trabi fans are preparing to mark the 50th birthday of a car that inspired numerous jokes.

It belches out fumes that breach anti-pollution regulations - but Germany has made an exception for it as no more have been produced since 1991.

The Zwickau plant churned out some three million Trabants, made of plasticised cotton waste, called Duroplast.

The first car rolled off the production line on 7 November 1957 - the 40th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, which the GDR celebrated with its big brother, the Soviet Union.


The Trabant's two-stroke engine could push the car to the dizzying speed of 90km per hour (56mph).

Its signature tune - "dang, dang, dang" - remains unmistakable.

"Many of its owners just love that sound," Helmuth Frauendorfer, a broadcaster with MDR German public radio, told BBC News.

"The Trabi disappears and there is a lot of nostalgia in the eastern part of Germany, not necessarily political. People long for the atmosphere of the pre-1989 years. Some of the Trabants have become collectors' items," he said.

Today there are 52,432 Trabant cars in Germany, making them more numerous than Jaguars in a country of fast car lovers, the news website Der Spiegel reports.

Trabi-mania is not confined to East Germany. Aficionados can be found in other former communist countries, such as Hungary and Romania.

Serban Pretor, who works for Romania's audiovisual council, owns not one, but two Trabants. The one he still drives was purchased in 1978 and the other - a collector's item - in 1980 and is carefully preserved in his garage.

Mr Pretor inherited his love of the Trabant from his father, a former fighter pilot, who bought his first car in 1972.

Serban Pretor was embroiled in a famous incident involving his Trabant, widely reported by the Romanian press.

In 2004 he was roughed up by two agents in the secret service which protects dignitaries, who were trailing his Trabant on a busy road.

They claimed in court that his attempt to overtake the car in front had surprised them, forcing them to end up off the road, an allegation Mr Pretor denies.

The Trabant is slowly disappearing. But 17 years after the collapse of the Berlin Wall 82 drivers' clubs all over Germany are gearing up for a year of parties - to show that despite all the jokes, the Trabi still has the last laugh.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/6381759.stm

What struck me is that in the land of autobahns, and in Germany- one of the most famous lands for speed enthusiasts, Trabants still outnumber Jaguars...

Just wondering- any EU ICMaggers have one of these?
 
G

Guest

I remember scrapping a wartburg 2-stroke estate many years ago, it was my uncles, you don't get any engine braking with a 2 stroke and the wartburg had ancient drum brakes like the trabant, he drove down a hill, the brakes overheated, no engine braking so couldn't slow down with the gears so crashed into a hegerow, he immediately scrapped the thing. It used to belch black smoke, god knows what its emission levels were!
 

ChaoticEntity

Active member
its germany, plenty of other cars then jags that go fast. Got passed on the autobahn by a RUF porsche doing ~300km an hour when I was doing about 210km/hr. when your doing ~135MPH and a car passes you like your standing still...yeah that's fast...

Lots of old cars running in Europe, some really neat old renualts and VW's, they get tons of cars that we never even hear of, Hell Ford makes a car they sell in europe called the Ka, what a piece of crap but I never saw one till I was in Greece! Don't see scooters nearly as much here as you do overseas either.
 

Pops

Resident pissy old man
Veteran
Don't know about the Trabant, Naga. Wasn't allowed to go into E. Germany when I was in the military. I moved to Germany in 1965 and bought a VW mini-van with a 34hp engine. I have to tell you that it is embarrassing to be driving down the autobahn and have a fat, red-wigged hooker pass you on foot, while chasing a trucker who didn't pay her. Damn things had no get up and go!
 

Gunter

Active member
Damn, I wrote a brilliant posting but it is all away now.

I think the east germans nostaligia is a little strange because it is as if they forgot that they lived in a dictatorship.
There were even tv shows about that two years ago.
How nice it was even though you had to wait 13 years for your trabant and that people cared more for each other than in capitalism today.

Especially the stasi cared for the people...
The secret service that did nothing else than spying on the own people.
In every house block lived a stasi guy, nice isn't it? :rolleyes:

@ pops, these must have been the times when the police and the hippies had the same vans, the t1.
 
Last edited:

Pops

Resident pissy old man
Veteran
Gunter, most of the cops I saw drove VW bugs with Porshe engines. They were a hell of a lot faster than I was. When I lived in Nue Isenberg, the name of the guy above me was Gunter. He was the landlady's son-in-law.
 

Gunter

Active member
It's not my real name but the name of a well known german author günter grass.
A friend an me used that as a code name for weed in school.
 

zamalito

Guest
Veteran
On a similar note has anyone seen the documentary called Yank Tanks its about how cuba stopped importing american cars in 1959l and there's a whole industry based on keeping these cars looking like new. There was one guy who rigged up his 1950's caddilac to illegally run on natural gas that he could take from the municipal gas lines. since gasoline disappeared almost completely after the fall of the soviet union. The american cars from this era have never been rivaled by american cars since.
 

Gunter

Active member
zamalito said:
I love that! Lets smoke some Günter grass, lol. Does anyone have a picture of one of these?
No, more like "It smells like günter here" :D
Or on the phone "Is günter coming too?"

It didnt take long until people realized what it means but it was just for fun anyway.
 
Top