Trabant

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This article is about an East German automobile. For information about the Icelandic electro-rock band Trabant, see Trabant (band).

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The Trabant is an automobile formerly produced by East German auto maker Sachsenring. It was the most common vehicle in East Germany, and was also exported to other socialist countries. The selling points was that it had comfortable room for four adults and luggage, it was compact, fast and durable.[1] Despite its poor performance and smoky two-stroke engine, the car has come to be regarded with affection as a symbol of East Germany and of the fall of communism, as many East Germans streamed into West Berlin and West Germany in their Trabants after the opening of the Berlin Wall in 1989. It was in production without any significant change for nearly 30 years. The name Trabant means "satellite" in German; the cars are often referred to as the Trabbi or Trabi, pronounced with a short a. Since it took the Trabant more than 10 years to be delivered from the time it was ordered people who finally got one were very careful with it and usually achieved quite some skill in maintaining and repairing it.

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There were two principal variants of the Trabant, the Trabant 500, also known as the Trabant P 50, produced 1957-1963; and the Trabant 601 (or Trabant P 60 series), produced from 1963 to 1991. The engine for both the 500 and 601 was a small two-stroke engine with two cylinders, giving the vehicle modest performance. At the end of production it delivered 25 horsepower (19 kW) from a 600 cc displacement. The car took 21 seconds from 0 to 100 km/h and the top speed was 112 km/h. The main problem with the engine was the smoky exhaust and the pollution it produced.

The Trabant's body panels were made of Duroplast, a form of plastic containing resin strengthened by wool or cotton. This helped the GDR to avoid expensive steel imports, but did not provide much crash protection, although in crash tests it has actually proved to be superior to some modern small hatchbacks. The Trabant was the second car to use Duroplast, after the "pre-Trabant" P70 model (1954-1959). A scene in the movie Black Cat, White Cat by Emir Kusturica shows a Trabant being eaten slowly by pigs.

Originally planned as a three-wheeled motorcycle, the decision to build a four-wheeled car came late in the planning process. The name Trabant was chosen in an internal contest in 1957, the year of Sputnik, the first artificial satellite. Previous motorcycle production at Sachsenring had been under the aegis of AWZ (Auto-Werke Zwickau).

The Trabant was not a particularly advanced car when it was launched; by the late 1950s small cars in western countries generally used cleaner and more efficient four-stroke engines. The Trabant's designers expected production to extend to 1967 at the latest, and East German designers and engineers created a series of more sophisticated prototypes through the years that were intended to replace the Trabi; several of these can be seen at the Dresden Transport Museum. However, each proposal for a new model was rejected by the GDR leadership for reasons of cost. As a result, the obsolete Trabant remained in production unchanged; in contrast, the Czechoslovak Škoda automobiles were continually updated and exported successfully. The Trabant's production method, which was extremely labor-intensive, remained unchanged, and much of the work came to be carried out by Vietnamese guest workers.

In 1989, a smaller version of the Volkswagen Polo engine replaced the elderly two-stroke engine, the result of a trade agreement between the two German states. The model, known as the Trabant 1,1 also had minor improvements to the brake and signal lights, a revised grille and replaced the coach spring-suspended chassis with one using MacPherson and Chapman struts. However, by the time it entered production in May 1990, German reunification had already been agreed to. The inefficient, labor-intensive production line was kept open only because of government subsidies. Demand plummeted, as residents of the east could now buy western cars. The production line closed in 1991.

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Although Trabants had been exported from East Germany, they became well-known in the West after the fall of the Berlin Wall when many were abandoned by their eastern owners after migrating west. News reports inaccurately described them as having cardboard bodies. In the early 1990s it was possible to buy a Trabant for as little as a few marks, and many were given away. Later, as they became collectors' items, prices recovered, but they remain very cheap cars.

The rock group U2 used Trabants as props on their Zoo TV Tour, including several vehicles suspended from the ceilings of concert halls. These cars can now be seen suspended from the ceiling at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, Ohio.

In the late 1990s, the Trabant was put back into production in Uzbekistan as the Olimp.[2][3]

In 1997, the Trabant suddenly became famous when it performed better than the Mercedes-Benz A-Class while performing the "Moose test" (a slalom with small obstacles on the course). The Thuringer Allgemeine Zeitung had a headline saying "Come and get us, moose! Trabi passes A-Class killer test".[4]

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