Look, real motoring writers like our own Phil King get to test Ferraris, Aston Martins, Lamborghinis and McLarens in exotic locations like the south of France and on legendary racetracks.
This week I paid my own fare, flew Aeroflot and tested a 1963 Trabant on the wintry streets of East Berlin. For the small number of you who are not East German car fans, the Trabant was the most popular automotive brand in the German Democratic Republic from 1957 until 1990.
They were so popular, that from the day you placed your order till the day you took delivery averaged 12 years. Some enthusiasts had to wait 16 years. But that didn’t matter, because apart from an increase in engine size and a cut in the number of features nothing much changed in the Trabi over 30 years. No wonder they sold 3 million of them.
So, what are the lessons here for Ford and Holden?
Well the Trabant was the only car you could buy in the GDR for 30 years. It was more technically advanced, more reliable with better resale than a Tesla, at least when the Trabi first came out. And it was somewhat green. The body was made from Duroplast, a light, strong, recycled material whose only downside was that animals liked to eat it. If you were on the land you needed a separate pen for your car and the pigs.
On the not so green side the two-stroke engine requires a mixture of petrol and two-stroke oil pushing out nine time the hydrocarbons and five times the CO2 emissions of a regular car. (Given that, this week, Volkswagen formally pleaded guilty to charges of conspiracy to commit wire fraud and to violate the Clean Air Act, customs violations and obstruction of justice and six executives are facing criminal charges with one arrested, maybe the Trabi is not so bad after all.)
Oh, and because there is no fuel pump, the gas tank sits above the engine, which is not normally a problem unless, a) the engine overheats and the car explodes, or b) you hit something or someone and the car explodes. As we used to say after a few Kircher Pils in the Sophienclub in Spandau, “If you put a banana in a Trabant the value will skyrocket for three weeks, until the banana rots”.
Anyway, let me be professional and get on with the road test. My car was the 600 model with the more powerful 19KW east-west (pun intended) engine, front-wheel drive and four on the column. Typically, the speedo wasn’t working but it took 23.48 minutes to get to third gear. The brakes have a tendency to lock and pull to both sides but at least the loud squeals from the drums let you know they’re working.
The Trabi only needs a small amount of choke (for younger readers a choke was a thing you pulled out to help a car get going on a cold morning) to start, but then you need to wind down the windows because exhaust fumes flood the car.
After about 15 minutes of speedy driving you can wind them back up until you stop at the next set of traffic lights. You shouldn’t confuse the exhaust fumes with the similarly smelling heater, which is also a thing under the dash you pull out. Although after an hour of driving the heater was smelling but not heating.
The steering is very direct but needs a lot of turns. Coming into any corner or turning at an intersection the quickest procedure is, 1) apply brakes gently at least 100 metres from the corner; 2) move gearstick into neutral (you can’t go directly into another gear until you have been in neutral for a while); 3) make sure you are at least 200m from the car in front (particularly if the car in front was built in any capitalist country after 1953); 4) make sure there are no pedestrians within 400m of you where you will turn the wheel (anything can happen when you brake, turn the wheel and change gears at the same time); 5) ignore the smoke coming from the back, nothing is on fire, it’s just the normal exhaust; and 6) then and only then, shut your eyes, turn into the corner and hope for the best.
Our test car came from www.trabi-safari.de. I paid $166, which is double the normal price, because the website is confusing but Mr Trabi offers no refunds. Nothing dodgy here.
This is a shortened version of the original article. To read the rest go to:http://www.theaustralian.com.au/life/motoring/trabant-put-smoke-if-not-heat-in-the-cold-war/news-story/dff5f516b7f091fa26b6e884ffc021b6
