
30 Years On, the ‘Worst Car Ever Built’ Has a Fervent Fan Club - lermontov
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/trabant-cars-east-germany
======
magwas
The trabi is a car specifically designed with a set of constraints: \- to be
cheap \- to be easy to manufacture with no need of low tolerance parts \- to
be easy to repair without much equipment

Those design goals were met perfectly. And the 2 stroke motor line designed by
eastern german engineers for MZ bikes and Trabi is actually an engineering
miracle of the time. The compression is partly achieved by the sound wave
reflected by the exhaust.

~~~
ptaipale
> The compression is partly achieved by the sound wave reflected by the
> exhaust.

It's more a "backflow" than "sound wave", but yes, it's there. It's been
standard in two-stroke engines for much longer than Trabi. And it's an
invention from the national-socialist era.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expansion_chamber](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expansion_chamber)

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rerx
Nitpick on one of the image captions: "A queue of Trabants passing Checkpoint
Charlie on their way to West Berlin, November 1989." In the front I mostly see
a couple of _Wartburgs_ not Trabants. The Wartburg was East Germany's fancier
"quality" car.

~~~
safgasCVS
DAMMIT THIS WAS GOING TO BE MY COMMENT :D

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TheSpiceIsLife
No fuel gauge, has dipstick in the tank. Tank is up front.

Manual window washer pump.

Wipers normal resting position is part the way up, obscuring view out the
windscreen.

500 cc two stroke motor, later upgraded to 600cc

Indicators don't cancel when the steering wheel returns to centre.

Apparently there's still about 34,000 of them registered in Germany.

\----

It hadn't occurred to me that early cars might have used two stroke engines.
That would have made for some fairly disgusting city air.

~~~
pedrocr
You can still buy cars with two stroke engines today. In Europe they're these
mini cars sold to teenagers and old people because they don't require a full
driving license.

~~~
detaro
I suspect even there two-stroke is getting rare, as it is in motorbikes. E.g.
I think here in Germany it's basically impossible to get a new model of two-
stroke vehicle licensed.

~~~
phillc73
Two-stroke engines don't have to be environmentally a poorer choice than four-
stoke engines.

Evinrude's e-tec two-stroke outboard engines are quite popular and have
received awards for low emission levels.[1]

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evinrude_Outboard_Motors](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evinrude_Outboard_Motors)

~~~
TheSpiceIsLife
I wasn't aware of this:

 _With direct fuel injection and a sump-based lubrication system, a two-stroke
engine produces air pollution no worse than a four-stroke, and it can achieve
higher thermodynamic efficiency._

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-
stroke_engine#Applications](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-
stroke_engine#Applications)

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logicallee
>Trabis had no fuel gauge, air conditioning, turn signals, or brake lights,
and could only reach a maximum speed of 62 miles per hour.

how can they have no fuel gauge? I can sort of understand how it is still
operational with the rest, but does it just stop and run out of gas at some
random time? does it start sputtering long enough for you to realize you need
to make it into another gas station?

this one has me stumped.

~~~
GoToRO
You fill the tank, you know you can run for 500 kilometers. You know that your
destination is 200km away. You can go and return on one tank. Also, the trips
took much longer than today so people would stop to eat and relax at some
point,and then you could also check the fuel.

The main difference is that you knew what the range of the car is on one tank
and the distance between cities. So you were more present and definitely not
bored.

~~~
bigiain
Then one day, there's a 50kmh headwind on your way home...

(Assuming a perfectly spherical cow of uniform density, if you drop the
assumed 100kmh cruising speed down to 75kmh, giving an airspeed of 125kmh and
a trip time of 2hr 40m at your ground speed of 75kmh, you'll run out of fuel
precisely between the two most inconveniently placed gas stations at the
bottom of a hill in both directions...)

~~~
GoToRO
Then what you would do, you would wait on the side of the road with the hood
up and wait for somebody to stop and ask for gas. All drivers had empty
recipients and a hose to pull gas out. You would make new friends. Drivers
were much more understanding and helpful in those times. I don't say it was
easy. I was just the way it was.

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IloveHN84
I thought the Fiat Multipla was the worst ever

~~~
ptaipale
No, it's merely a contender for the ugliest...

~~~
fredley
Ugly, but iconic.

~~~
ptaipale
Yes. It's to cars what "The Scream" is to paintings.

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frereubu
I understand the interest in characterful cars like this, but the first thing
that comes to mind when I hear about Trabants is car crash videos on YouTube
where they're utterly obliterated by even a pretty minor crash with a modern
car. Driving one of these outside of an area with low speed limits would give
me the heebie jeebies.

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kvgr
These guys basically travaled the world in them, not sure if those videos are
available in English, but it is a lot of fun.
[http://tamazpet.transtrabant.cz/](http://tamazpet.transtrabant.cz/)

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lukaszkups
I had a trabi too! It had even its own promo video :D
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q0uWKTVx_I8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q0uWKTVx_I8)

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runxel
This car is also famous for being an asset in Half Life 2 – even tho you can
never drive one of those beauties there...

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glastra
Check out the Jalopy videogame, where you own, drive and repair a car inspired
by the Trabant.

~~~
_iyig
Or in a similar vein, “My Summer Car:”

[https://youtu.be/r0IZ_TEzg7M](https://youtu.be/r0IZ_TEzg7M)

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Wyndtroy2012
It was a terrible car in some (many) respects, but it definitely is not "the
worst car ever built". The Trabi has a lot of things going on for it.

1\. It is very light. The motor is tiny, the whole thing is like 600 kilos
(not absolutely sure, but I know for a fact that 4 normal men can pick it up
to move it to the side a bit).

2\. Given its size, there is quite a bit of space inside

3\. Since it is so small and light, it is very easy to drive. You literally
don't need the clutch: there is a clutch pedal, but you don't need it -- you
can switch gears as long as you are not pressing the gas pedal. (The gears,
btw, are very light, and the "stick" is not a stick, it is on the wheel -- you
can operate it with one finger without taking your hands off the wheel.)

4\. With electronic ignition (it can be installed easily on top of the stock
model) the motor behaves quite well.

5\. It is cheap, not only because it is bad, but also because it is just
cheap. Not many moving parts, nothing fancy in it, you get the point. I don't
know how accessible spare parts are nowadays of course (this was the problem
back in the day as well; finding spare parts was a bitch).

It isn't a "good" car, given what we expect from cars these days, but for a
city car it is quite OK. Still not as dirty as a diesel ;-)

PS: there is an old Trabant joke that goes like this: a car collector from the
US hears about it and wants to have one. He orders it and has it shipped over.
On arrival, he looks at it in confusion, then writes back to the sender: "I
wanted the car, not the toy model!"

~~~
interfixus
In my far younger days I had the great good fortune to own a Morris Mini - the
original doghouse, not the modern pastiche. That car _did_ weigh 600 kg, and I
happen to know for a fact that six men could easily pick it up and carry it a
distance. I also know that it had a length of very close to 3 meters, and that
the basement ramp where those six men put it was 3.10 meters wide. As they
said when they fetched me, "You may wish to grab something to drink".

~~~
ptaipale
Many of us have done that to people like teachers who owned a Fiat 600 or 127.

~~~
interfixus
You may be thinking of the Fiat 126, sort of an updated 600. The 127 was a
somewhat heftier hatchback, more like a VW Polo or Ford Fiesta.

~~~
ptaipale
It surely was 127 - heftier, but still definitely hand-movable by a half a
dozen of adolescents...

Fiat 127 is front-wheel-drive and bigger than Fiat 600, but still weighs under
700 kg.

