Trabis enjoy cult status in former East Germany

By Mike Swanson Oct 8, 2006, 13:52 GMT

Berlin - Nearly 50 years after the first model rolled off the production lines, the car that became a symbol of East Germany can still be seen pottering along German roads.

More than 58,000 Trabi cars are still in use across united Germany, around 85 per cent of them in the former communist East, according to the Federal Vehicle Registration Centre.

'Once you've come to like a Trabi, you'll always want to have one,' says Annegret Ernst, deputy chairperson of the International Trabant Register based in the city of Zwickau.

Like other Trabi enthusiasts, Ernst and her organization strive to maintain the cult status of the car, whose full name Trabant means satellite in German.

Some 3.7 million Trabis were produced at the VEB Sachsenring Automobilwerke Zwickau from November 1957 until 1991 - two years after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Despite its modest performance and smoky two-stroke engine, the Trabi was the most common vehicle in East Germany, and was also exported to other socialist countries.

The collapse of communism and the opportunity this presented to East Germans to buy flashier Western cars, led to the market for the dour-looking Trabant drying up.

At the end of production the car's two-cylinder engine delivered 25 horsepower (19 kW) from a 600 cc displacement. The car took 21 seconds from 0 to 100 kph and had a maximum speed of 112 kph.

Its bodywork was made from a hardened plastic containing resin strengthened by wool or cotton, which helped East Germany's centrally guided economy avoid expensive steel imports.

The chassis construction pays off for today's owners because it does not rust as much as metal ones. Its easy-to-repair engine 'means you can do a lot of work yourself,' says Ernst.

Motorists had to wait up to 15 years to take delivery of a Trabi, the general appearance of which remained largely unchanged for more than three decades.

But when it was finally delivered it became a prized possession and was affectionately maintained to the extent that it was sometimes hard to tell a 10-year-old Trabi from a new one.

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 westward.

They also appeared in feature films like Go Trabi Go, a comedy about an East German family making their way across Europe, released shortly after reunification, and the more recent Good Bye Lenin!, which took a nostalgic look at the fall of the wall.

Trabis also became the butt of jokes like, 'How do you make a Trabant go 100 km/h? Push it off a cliff!' or 'How do you double the value of a Trabant? Fill up the tank!'

Today, tourists can take part in a 90-minute Trabi safari around the sights of Berlin or the picturesque city of Dresden, known as the Florence of the River Elbe.

The tours, conducted in several languages, including English and Spanish, also offer people the chance to drive one of the four-gear manual change cars complete with choke for cold winter days.

The International Trabi Register is organizing a Trabi rally in June next year to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the start of the car's production.