History
VEB Sachsenring started up as a company that made a luxury saloon, the Sachsenring P240. In 1959 the DDR government nationalised the company and forced them to make a people's car to rival the Volkswagen beetle, which was being sold in the west. Their answer was the trabant, a 4 seater 2 door saloon made from cotton waste, wood and resin. People knew this as the "cardboard box on wheels" due to its construction. You had to wait ten whole years to get one. The underpinnings was from a DKW 300, a pre-war "beetle like" car which was made by Audi. Their first car was the P50, which looked like a beetle. The engine was a two stroke two cylinder engine belching out blue smoke due to you needing to put oil and petrol in the same time, to stop the engine from clogging up. The blue smoke was 90 times worse than a Mercedes saloon in the 90s. It was so bad, America had to ban them.
The chassis stayed the same but the body was changed into what appeared to be a "mini saloon" with forked lights called the P601. This was the most famous one, being made from 1960 to 1991 with hardly any changes except different carpet, a economy meter and a fuel gauge. They were made out of Resin and Cotton, which made the car light and strong, so much so you actually couldn't get rid of it. If your "trabbi" broke down, you were left with its non biodegrading corpse. You had to pay the government roughly £100 for them to dispose of it. People thought this was a stupid idea having to pay the government to get rid of their car. There was no fuel gauge. To check how much fuel you had to dip a diptstick into the fuel tank (which was placed on top of the engine, the car had no fuel pump and was gravity fed). In 1991, IFA and Sachsenring were running out of customers, since people could now be able to buy BMW's and Opel's. IFA did a ditch effort and released a facelifted P601 with a 1.1 engine from a Volkswagen Polo(they did the same with the Wartburgs, just with Passat engines). Sachsenring got fed up with the reunification of Germany and simply knocked their building down and went into bankruptcy. In 2002 however, a company from Leipzig called "HQM" brought Sachsenring and use it to make more Volkswagen Polos. |
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Legacy
. There seems to be a lot of trabant related things in berlin. There is a "trabi-world" where you can hire trabants and a museum with a trabant simulator, inside a real trabant. There is an extortionately large following of these cars in Poland and England with "trabant-treffens" happening day in day out. Treffens are a part of Gerrman Culture, namely a huge meet and greet.
So far, even if the car is one of the worst ever made, it's a icon of oppression and a glimmer of hope in the country. |