Trabant

~ the obituary ~

A citizen of the German Democratic Republic who wanted a Trabant put their name down and then waited somewhere between ten and thirteen years for the car to arrive. In 1989 the demand for them ran about forty-three times what the factory could produce. This is the number that explains everything else about the object, including why a second-hand Trabant in reasonable condition sold for more than the list price of a new one, and why people put newborns on the list.

It was built at Zwickau by VEB Sachsenring, in a plant with a motor industry going back to Audi's first factory, and the first P50 came off the line in November 1957. The body panels were duroplast, a resin board pressed out of Soviet cotton waste and East German phenol, which was used because sheet steel was scarce and hard currency was scarcer. The engine was a 594cc two-stroke twin making 26 horsepower, with no fuel pump, so the tank sat above the engine and gravity did the work. You mixed the oil into the gasoline yourself at the pump.

The 601 went into production in 1964 and stayed there, essentially unaltered, until 1990. Twenty-six years of the same car is not incompetence on its own; the design was signed off inside a planned economy that measured the plant on units delivered and had no mechanism for spending money on a replacement nobody was demanding, given that everyone was already in the queue for this one. Several proposed successors were drawn up over the decades and none of them got the allocation.

~ the case file ~

~ the wait ~

The waiting list is the part that gets treated as a joke and it was a functioning economic instrument. A place in the queue was a transferable asset. It could be inherited, it turned up in divorce settlements, and it gave the state a durable hold on people who did not want to lose their position by making themselves inconvenient. A car you get in 1990 for a form you filed in 1978 is a different kind of possession from a car you buy.

Owners maintained them themselves because there was no alternative, and the two-stroke made that plausible. The engine has five moving parts you would ever need to touch. Clubs and a swap economy in used parts grew up around the car, and East German garages kept rebuilding the same 601 engine well past the point where the state had stopped supplying spares for it.

~ november 1989 ~

When the border checkpoints opened on 9 November 1989 the footage that went around the world was mostly of Trabants. Small, loud, blue-smoking cars coming through the Berlin checkpoints and over the Bavarian border crossings, with West Germans clapping on the pavement. That image did more for the car's fame than thirty-two years of production had, and it also finished it, because everyone in those cars now had access to a market full of eight-year-old Golfs and Opels for less money than a new Trabant.

Turkey never had a Trabant, and did not need one to understand the shape of the problem. The domestic market there was closed for decades too, which is how Anadol came to build fiberglass-bodied cars on Ford mechanicals from 1966, and how Tofaş kept selling variations on a 1970s Fiat body in Bursa into the 2000s. Protection produces long-lived designs everywhere it is applied. The difference is that nobody in Turkey waited eleven years for a Şahin.

~ what zwickau makes now ~

The last attempt was the Trabant 1.1, which dropped a licensed 1.05 liter Volkswagen four-stroke into the old body from May 1990. It was cleaner and more expensive and it arrived into a currency union where nobody wanted it, and fewer than forty thousand were made before the line stopped on 30 April 1991. The plant went to Volkswagen.

Zwickau is now one of the largest electric vehicle factories in Europe. Volkswagen converted the site entirely to battery cars at the end of the 2010s, so the address that built 3.7 million two-strokes on cotton-waste bodywork now builds ID models for the whole group. The surviving Trabants went the other way and became collectible, with restored 601s changing hands in Germany for several times what one cost new.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »