30 Years On, the ‘Worst Car Ever Built’ Has a Fervent Fan Club

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/trabant-cars-east-germany

by lermontov • 7 years ago

28 56 7 years ago

atlasobscura.com

TheSpiceIsLife5• 7 years ago

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.

pedrocr2• 7 years ago

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• 7 years ago

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.

TheSpiceIsLife5• 7 years ago

Interesting. I've tried a few searches and haven't found anything. Are you able to provide more information to refine my search, or do you know the names of any of these cars?

raxxorrax• 7 years ago

That would have made for some fairly disgusting city air.

Indeed. You can smell one of them for miles. Some say they like it but on the other hand some people sniff adhesives.

jwr• 7 years ago

Also, you can see a trail of white smoke behind the car: fumes from the burned oil are white.

[For the uninitiated: 2-stroke engines require adding oil to fuel, as there is no separate oil chamber, so when you fill up the tank, you need to add a pre-determined amount of oil]

ptaipale8• 7 years ago

For me, smell of two-stroke engines is a smell of youth. My father's chainsaw, and later my own moped/motorbike.

In fact it is curious how people may associate smells so strongly with negative or positive feelings.

A thick smoke of 2-stroke exhaust in a city isn't a fun thing. But as an occasional smell, it's nostalgic, good.

Wyndtroy2012• 7 years ago

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!"

interfixus2• 7 years ago

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".

ptaipale8• 7 years ago

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

_iyig2• 7 years ago

Besides its similarly light weight, the 3-cylinder Geo Metro was short enough to fit sideways inside a typical American parking space. Thus college kids would often lift and turn it, between two other occupied spots.

runxel3• 7 years ago

Also you can do everything by yourself. No need for a mechanic. The motto goes "Hammer, Zange, Draht, kommste bis nach Leningrad". ('hammer, pliers, wire: it'll get you all the way to Leningrad').

And you have to consider, that this car basically never got an update (P 50 and P60 are pretty much the same car, just a different motor. The P 601 was built from 1964 til the end of Socialism. The 1.1 doesn't really count).

magwas• 7 years ago

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.

ptaipale8• 7 years ago

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

rerx• 7 years ago

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• 7 years ago

DAMMIT THIS WAS GOING TO BE MY COMMENT :D

IloveHN84• 7 years ago

I thought the Fiat Multipla was the worst ever

ptaipale8• 7 years ago

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

fredley• 7 years ago

Ugly, but iconic.

logicallee• 7 years ago

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.

pvg• 7 years ago

There's a dipstick, like for oil.

ptaipale8• 7 years ago

Most of the time you know your routine, and how much you've driven since filling up, and that tells you how much fuel you have left.

jfk13• 7 years ago

According to a comment above, there's a dipstick in the tank. Just need to remember to check it...

GoToRO2• 7 years ago

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.

bigiain3• 7 years ago

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...)

ollie87• 7 years ago

I believe the early ones had a dip-stick-type deal to measure the tank, check it before you set off etc. I think the later ones did have a fuel guage though.

blkhawk• 7 years ago

like a motorcycle it has a reserve setting on the fuel line vent. That means if main runs empty you just need to change over to reserve and find a gas station.

bigiain3• 7 years ago

Most motorcycles don't have fuel gauges.

Most riders reset the trip meter when they fill up, and know pretty accurately how far the get out of a tank.

My ~20 year old Ducati has a low fuel light, which used to come on at about 1/4 of a tank (you'd safely get 40-50km after it first came on), but that stopped working in about 2001 or so.

One of my Hondas has a fuel tap with "main" and "reserve". It's splutter a bit for around a km or so - and eventually stop if you don't switch from main to reserve in time. (And then one day it'll start spluttering and you'll go to turn it to reserve, and it'll already be there because you got distracted when you filled it up and forgot to put it back on main - that's one of the reasons why I always reset the trip meter every tie I fill any of my bikes...)

the-dude• 7 years ago

Motorcycles often have/had no gauge. The tank has a 3-way valve : 'closed'(when parked or stored), 'regular':90% of the tank contents and the 'reserve':about 10% of content to get to a gas-station.

runxel3• 7 years ago

As the others already said:

You had a dipstick.

You knew how much you've driven since the last time you refueled.

And even if you just forgot everything else there is a lever on the passenger side called "Reserve". Pull that and you have about 5 liters more. That should get you to the next gas station.

esotericn2• 7 years ago

I've ridden motorcycles with no fuel gauge.

You ride it until it sputters, yes, then use the reserve (which gives you at least another 40 miles or so) and fill up.

Or just use the odometer to guess. I'd just top up every 200mi or so.

If you leave it on reserve you're SOL. :)

Remember the old Game Boy? You wait until the power light goes a bit dim and change the batteries.

lukaszkups2• 7 years ago

I'm amazed that no one answered the question - there's also a "R" switch ("Reserve") which you can turn on when you're low on fuel (or try to launch in the Winter) - so it was something like low fuel light nowadays, but manual (it was placed lower in tank than regular fuel drain)

And yes, to know exact fuel status you had to lift up the hood and check ;)

I am / was (still have Trabi at my parent's place, but haven't ride it for ~5 years) proud Trabi owner, AMA :)

Merrill• 7 years ago

Early VW Beetles had no fuel gauge either. They had a reserve fuel tank, and a lever to switch over to the reserve. Can't recall whether they had a dipstick or not. https://www.manualslib.com/manual/940047/Volkswagen-1958-Bee... https://www.manualslib.com/manual/940047/Volkswagen-1958-Bee...

glastra• 7 years ago

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

_iyig2• 7 years ago

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

https://youtu.be/r0IZ_TEzg7M

kvgr• 7 years ago

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/

frereubu• 7 years ago

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.

lukaszkups2• 7 years ago

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

runxel3• 7 years ago

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

30 Years On, the ‘Worst Car Ever Built’ Has a Fervent Fan Club

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