What should a car be?
A car can be anything from simply a mode of transportation to a source of exhilaration. It could offer the most basic features to the most luxurious ones. It could be built simply, or it could be the most complex piece of engineering. It could be a good car or a bad car!
What makes a car good or bad?
Does a good car need to have excellent performance? Should it be reliable? Should it be affordable? Should it be economical to run and maintain, pollute less, and be safe? Does it need to satisfy all of these criteria? Or does it need to offer an acceptable compromise for each of them? Does this question even matter to someone if their choice of available cars is limited to just one?
And who decides if a car is good, bad, fantastic, ridiculous, etc.? And on what basis?
The responses would vary extensively if a random international survey were conducted for this question. Every response will be justified in its reasoning, and that reasoning will depend on several factors. For example, where does the person live? What is the economic situation of their country? What is their economic situation? What circumstances did they grow up in? Where did they receive their education? What company do they keep? Etc.
So, given these parameters, is the subject of this article, the Trabant, a good or a bad car? Let’s dig deeper.
History is one of my favorite topics, especially the history of WW2 and the events around it. One such event was the division of Germany into East and West. While the West adopted capitalism and gained world recognition for producing fantastic automobiles, the situation in the socialist East was opposite. My love for cars led me to research East German cars, specifically the Trabant. During a trip to Berlin, I saw several of them at Trabi World near Checkpoint Charlie, where they were being offered for sightseeing. Later, I saw one in factory condition during a visit to the VW museum at Wolfsburg.
I hadn’t seen a Trabant before that trip. Only read about it. And an overwhelming majority of articles painted it as one of the worst cars ever made. If you do a Google search for the Trabant, you will see search suggestions like: Is the Trabant made out of Cardboard? Is Trabant the worst car ever? So, returning to the earlier point about good or bad cars, did the Trabant really deserve such bad press?
In West Germany, BMW, Mercedes, Audi, Volkswagen, Porsche, etc., were producing magnificent cars with world-leading luxury and performance. The East Germans, on the other hand, made the Trabant and the Wartburg. The Trabant wouldn’t even compare to a basic car from the West. While the Western cars offered 6, 8, 10, or even 12-cylinder powerful engines, the Trabant, for its entire life cycle of three decades, was stuck with a two-stroke, two-cylinder, 600 cc engine producing a measly 23 HP.
This contrast led me to do more research on the car and the lives of people in East Germany. How could the East Germans live with this situation when their relatives and friends just across the border had access to the most magnificent automobiles in the world? Did they not desire similar cars as their western counterparts? Did that not create frustration and unrest? Elvis was very famous in East Germany. In 1958, he bought the BMW 507, a handsome sports car he loved driving. Did the East Germans not want the vehicle their idol drove?
After reading several books and research articles on East German life and the Trabant, I better understand why the Trabant remained unchanged for three decades. I even feel endeared to the car to the extent that I do not think it deserved the ridicule it received.
My own growing up in a developing country with some flavor of socialism also helped inform this view. For almost four decades, the country where I grew up offered primarily two cars. You can read about them here. While they were upgraded over time, both cars’ basic architecture and powertrains remained the same from the 1950s.
The “worst car” attribution has truth if the evaluation is purely based on the criteria used in a capitalist economy. The point that is missed, or rather not considered at all, is the context in which that car was manufactured and sold. The traditional way of evaluating a car is also representative of the capitalist economy because the concepts of power, speed, luxury, features, etc., were not important in the socialist world. The Trabant shouldn’t be looked at from the point of view of what was wrong with the car. Rather, it is a reflection of what was wrong with the system of governance.
After the war, Germany was ravaged. The trajectory that East Germany took for rebuilding looked very different from the West. Adopting socialism meant that most of the population wasn’t rich, by design. Land redistribution ensured no wealthy landlords, and business consolidation and nationalization meant no big businesses.
The government recognized that its citizens needed a car for their families. The weather in Germany required a family of 4 to have a closed vehicle. The car had to be cheap because no one could afford an expensive one. Shortage of raw materials, most importantly, steel, had to be accounted for. Oil was expensive, so efficiency was important.
After the war, the Soviets carried away large parts of the remaining German industry, leaving behind a poor production infrastructure. Whatever was left of the Audi factory in Zwickau became VEB (Volkseigener Betrieb or ‘People’s Own Factory’) in 1949, which started producing the Trabant almost a decade later. The other auto factory, the former BMW plant in Eisenach, went on to manufacture the Wartburg. The Wartburg was the second East German car – more expensive, built with higher quality materials in much lower numbers, primarily for exports.
Given these constraints, the Trabant was the best the East Germans could come up with for mass-market consumption. It was initially launched with the model number P-50 in 1958 and upgraded to the Trabant 601 in 1963. It remained unchanged until the German reunification in 1989. After the reunification, a newer version with a 1100 CC VW engine was launched, but by this time, the Trabant was way past its lifetime. The production ended in 1991 after nearly 3.1 million units.
At the time of its launch, the Trabant was contemporary. It had innovations to boast about – like the body built from Duraplast (a plastic), using the engine to heat the cabin in the winter, etc. The simple 2-cylinder engine with no fuel pump made the car very easy to repair. Reliability was a concern, but most owners got around it by carrying an extra engine in case it needed to be swapped out.
The Trabant perhaps holds records for the highest wait times for a new automobile and for the longest duration of service. On average, a customer had to wait 10 or more years to buy a new one. This meant that the second-hand market was very strong. Used Trabants often went for more than brand-new. The simple mechanics, rust-free plastic body, and good care taken by owners resulted in the Trabant having an average lifespan of 28 years.
Continuous innovation is necessary for an automobile brand. Without it, the brand won’t survive. In the case of Trabant, the VEB management refused to fund any new project. Engineers’ and designers’ pleas for building new prototypes were turned down. For those amongst us who have faced budget cuts at their companies, consider an extreme version of that. Sadly for the Trabant, this cost-cutting lasted its entire life. While the automotive world, and especially the West Germans, were coming up with new features, the Trabant stuck to its original formula. And with that came the moniker of the worst car in the world.
After the German unification, the Trabant got more attention from the rest of the automotive world. Almost overnight, the world realized how far behind it was in every aspect. With access to other, better cars, East Germans abandoned their Trabants in droves. Though they were left to rot, their Duraplast bodies ensured they wouldn’t. This was a new environmental problem that the socialist system had not thought of when building it.
It is easy for the Western world to put the label of the “Worst Car” or “A symbol of the decay of Socialism” on the Trabant, but what these labels ignore is how important the Trabant was to the people in East Germany at a time when the citizens had little influence over public policy. The Trabant should be seen for what it meant for the people and what it provided them, rather than being ridiculed for what it lacked.
I acknowledge that it is hard to imagine driving an air-cooled 2-stroke-engined car when the neighbors were producing magnificent automobiles. Even for the humble middle class, there were so many great cars across the world. In 1989, while Toyota launched the Lexus LS400, a new luxury benchmark, to compete with Mercedes, BMW, and Audi, the East Germans were still waiting in line to buy the Trabant. To an extent, the Trabant and the dissatisfaction it caused amongst the East Germans contributed to the fall of the GDR.
Production of the Trabant ended in 1991. Since then, it has found a following worldwide, especially in Europe. They are affectionately called Trabis, with owners gathering regularly to take trips and generally have a fun time. I hope this continues and we see Trabis in the real world for a long time.
References:
- https://www.howandwhy.com/world/the-trabant-is-why-socialism-failed
- Eli Rubin (2009), ‘The Trabant: Consumption, Eigen-Sinn, and Movement,’ History Workshop Journal, 68.1, https://academic.oup.com/hwj/article/68/1/27/661625
- The Socialist Car: Automobility in the Eastern Bloc. Edited by Lewis H Siegelbaum
- Katja Hoyer, Beyond the Wall: A History of East Germany
