The Trabant Was an Awful Car Made By Communists 

"Yeah, I drive a German import."

"What's the 0-60 time?" "No." "Oh, ok."

I once owned a Trabant and one night I accidentally left the garage unlocked and to my horror and dismay, in the morning I discovered someone had left another Trabant in my Garage.

A common Trabant joke. - How do you double the value of a Trabant? - You fill it up with gas.

How do you double the value of a Trabant? Fill it with gas.

No need for lock because Not your stuff Our stuff

I was in Germany shortly after the wall fell, and Trabannts were coming over the border. The west-German autobahns were littered with Trabbys that had expired while trying to keep up with traffic. The used-car market in Germany was going wild.

My dad owned 7 of these cars one after the other. He also swapped engines from better ones with low or very low mileage. He had a handbook specially made for the Trabant in which the author pretty much shared all his knowledge on how to upgrade or forge parts for the car if needed. All in all the Trabant wasn't fantastic, but was able to run okay.

Drove one in Berlin last year. Great fun. Had a race against a bicycle at a green light, nearly lost.

The car we all paint as kids does really exist.

I started my three year assignment in West Germany the day the wall came down. I got to witness the shock on East Germany faces when they came over to West Germany. The poor Trabays were in many accidents(mostly fatal). The E.G. people were coming out of a fifty year time warp. Very interesting times.

You are not the only one who despaired of the gear shift. As a "West German", I had the chance to drive one in a parking lot. A colleague of mine drove an old Trabant, and I didn't dare drive it on the street. It was a strange, funny experiment, though! There were waiting lists in East Germany, where you had to wait up to 15 years for a Trabant. Used, ancient cars were sold at black market at almost new car prices, because otherwise it was almost impossible to get a car. Welcome to communism! I was born in 1988 and could hardly believe such stories. When the wall fell and Germany was reunited, even East Germans came all the way to us in the very northwest of (formerly) West Germany to buy the used car market empty, because the whole GDR was fed up with the Trabant and wanted "modern, western" cars - You couldn't blame them.

You don’t need to lock the doors on a trabant because the car itself is the anti-theft device

Still waiting for the AMG version.

A true Trabant enthusiast would never let his Trabi be so neglected. By the way, this car can be made into a really chic "racing cardboard" with little effort. Here in Central Germany there are still some very well-preserved and well-maintained Trabant 601s that are quite capable of surprising with great looks and impressive driving characteristics.

In 1992 I slightly rammed a VEB Sachsenring trabant station wagon with a VW Passat variant. Nothing was to be seen on the VW, the fender of the Trabant was broken, the bonnet was rammed into the windshield like a knife. Luckily nothing happened to anyone. I bought the same Trabant in the next village for 100 German marks and gave it to the people.

“This car can get up to 300 hectares on a single tank of kerosene” “What country is this from” “It no longer exists”

* slaps roof of trabant "this baby can go from 0 to 60 going downhill"

I drove through East Germany to visit West Berlin in 1964. I remember seeing a lot of these things belching blue smoke. Always wondered what they were.

Been from West Germany I had the pleasure to own a couple after the wall came down - you got them literally for free! As a motorcyclist I enjoyed the opportunity to have a rainy day vehicle for no other cost than fuel - but these things do guzzle! Anyway, had the time of my life. You know what they say: a car made of duraplast need a driver made of steel! On a note: my exhaust manifold fall off one night and I swear this is till today the loudest vehicle I ever drove - it made my ears bleeding :-)

“What is zero to 60?” “It doesn’t go to 60” Edit: damn 3.4k likes? Also, it’s been a year already?????

Fun fact: its exterior does not rust because it is made of plastic.

I remember these cars on the Autobahn when the wall came down. The families had all their earthly belongings in and on the car driving slow as hell, it was sad and funny at the same time as we watched familial generations who had no clue what freedom was attempt to navigate a truly new beginning and a testament to the abject failure that is communism.

Doug: "What's the 0-60" Robert: "Uh, we'll, it doesn't exist" That killed me! 🤣

Q. How do you make a Trabant go faster? A. Call a tow truck.

Two Trabbi facts missed: 1.) It's made of duraplastic (sort of budget fibreglass). 2.) To buy one new, you had to apply to be on a *TEN YEAR WAITING LIST*

7:22 DOUG SAID A NO NO BAD WORD

12k communists disliked his video

*This must be the basic model. The expensive model had the fuel dipstick built into the fuel cap* 👍

What is a Trabant on top of a hill? A miracle. What are 50 Trabants on top of a hill? A Trabant factory.

I rented one on my last trip to East Berlin. The reverse gear was so confusing that my two buddies and I would just half pick up and half shove it into the parallel parking spots. It was so terrible that we took it back after a couple of hours and walked/rode the bus everywhere else we went. Good times...

…a few things to keep in mind: - THIS was, what the East Germans were allowed to build by Russian authority! E.g. no 4 stroke engines! That was reserved for Russia. So that kind of puts the UAZ Wolga in a new light, as they were free in their engineering choices! - to get one of these in East Germany, you usually as parents ordered one for your newly born so she/he would get one 18 years later!

I drove one of this in Romania. We say this is the longest limo in the world. 1% car and the rest is the smoke.

My Czech parents had to wait 14 YEARS to get one of these back in the day :D

I'm disappointed you didn't mention that the body was not made of steel but of some strange kind of resin, which was quite innovative in the 1960's when the Traband was first released.

As a 2-stroke motorcycle rider (Suzuki RH599) and pilot, i immediately loved this car when it saw it in Berlin. NO COASTING ? No problem! The “no coasting, except in neutral” is exactly like a motorcycle (where you hold the clutch and just downshift) if you want to coast. NO GAS GAUGE? Correct. Same as an RG500 and other early bikes ! DOOR LOCKS: The right door that only locks from inside and outside lock only on the left side? Sounds crazy until you’ve flown Cessna airplanes like C172/182. Fun to see & probably drive!

Here in Iceland we had the deluxe edition which had a rear ashtray.

Doug’s future teenage kid: “Dad I want a German car” Doug: “THIS...”

I've owned a Trabant in Connecticut for almost 2 years, and absolutely love it. As long as you're not in a rush to get anywhere, it's a lot of fun to drive. It will get you where you need to go, which is basically what a car is for, but without all the frills we've become used to in the West. It's simple to work on, and thanks to the German Trabi clubs, parts are readily available. I encourage others in the U.S. to own one!

7:00 and now we can coast! and now we can coast! just like like in any other moter mobile.

“I wouldn’t buy one, but I’m glad he did.” The ideal friendship.

"The exterior design changed very little..." Well, as we all know - you can't improve upon perfection!

Hi, do you still have it? Something was wrong with your engine. If you run it at 1:50 gas/oil mix it will not smoke that much. Have you forgotten to disengage the choke or is there a trouble with choke linkage? Also might be a problem with the carb float. Then, also check ignition timing. May be a bit late? Unless on the highway, the Trabant feels very agile and quick. 55 mph top speed is ridiculously low too. Something wrong! My Trabant Universal (wagon) did 115 km/h (~70 mph). Lovely lil screamer.

In east Germany and to a part in west Germany this car to this day is cult. You’re always happy to see one in the street and it’s just joyful to see how far people can push this car to do things it was never meant to do. Even tho it might not be a good car, it still is an important part of German Automobil history.

"What gear am I in right now?" "Let me feel it, I can't tell by looking" This killed me.

Z = Zu (Close) A = Auf (Open) R = Reserve

somehow i got a hold of a maisto 1/64 trabant... instantly fell in love with the body style.... learning about the extended history of this car was quite a journey.... Doug, I am so happy you found one, and gave us all a really good look at one!!!

My great grandpa had a Trabant with one deluxe edition, an automatic transmission 😂

This makes the Yugo look like a luxury vehicle

"Isn't this car harmful to the environment?" Tribant: The what?

In Germany enthusiasts like to say: "Only men out of steel drive cars out of cardboard".

Two stroke engines - God. My friend had one of these and a Wartburg Knight. When he started them up, it was like a 2nd world war destroyer laying down a smoke screen.

very old comunistic joke: What is the longest car in the world? Trabant - 15 meters with the smoke!

The fuel valve translates as follows: Z= Zu= closed A= Auf = open R= Reserve = reserve This was mandatory due to the fact that there was no fuel gauge. You run the car in the A/open position until you recognize it starting to cough and starve. That's the time to put it in R=reserve so you can drive with a remaining liter or so to the next filling station.

Total: 2,818,547 units were produced. Good Trabant is easy to drive, reaches 120 km/h 75 miles

Trabant drivers say, it is the quietest car they know.....because they have their knees pressed up to their ears while driving... My favourite colloquial name for this contraption: "Roofed spark plug"

You only needed two people to build a Trabant - one to fold and one to glue!

I had a friend who replaced the engine in this car with a golf 3 gti engine. Man, at 150km/h you feel like death is just around the corner, and it is.

my grandfather had a Trabant the Combi version my dad grew up on the rear seats of a trabant. my Grandfather was actually happy with the trabant because you didnt have to put any cooling fluid in it. They even gone to a vacation to Croatia with this Oversized lawnmover. then parked right next to a Mercedes. (i live in Czech republic Přerov so thats where they were going to Croatia from) and no, they were not the only ones on the highway with a trabant. there were lots of other Trabants and smoke.

what is the 0 to 60 in this car? Depends on how steep the downward slope is.

Why have seatbelts in a car that can’t even outrun the neighbours dog?

I grew up in Romania and when I was 16 one rich kid get a Trabant for his 18 birthday. We race every day and he won only when my bicicle chain felt off. When I turn 18 he let me drive the beast and I notice the fourth pedal. He said it' s the latest model with an airbag pump.

My grandparents used to drive this car in communist Romania back in the 80s . I use to visit them and we would go on summer vacation trips to the sea and the mountains with the trabant . As a small child I was fascinated by it . And I remember clearly the noise and cracking the engine and frame would do as well as the gasoline smell inside the car. Absolutely fond of those special memories .

My father owned one and everyone else I knew that owned one has fond memories of it. Probably because there was little comparison. It drove slow, broke down easily but it was efficient and very easy to fix. The simpler the better, especially in an austerity economy. You came off as condescending in your video instead of giving it the credit it deserved for the time it was designed.

me: mom, can i have a BMW? my mom: no, we have a german car at home german car at home:

Do you really need seatbelts when everyone else was driving a Trabant?

...."How much faster can a Trabant go over 70? It depends on how high you drop it from" lol

I love the blue smoke, can already smell it. Reminds me of my first Motorcycle I bought back in 2007, a '77 Jawa 350 from Czechoslovakia delivering a tremendous 27 hp. It was a heavy smoker, as it run with a 1:33 mixture, but in all those years it never let me down and I truly miss it. The problem with coasting is, that the twostroke engine gets its lubrication with the premixed gasoline (no seperate oil pump). So if the engine revs quicker and you coast, it only gets its vital oil from the idle jet - not enough to provide sufficent lubrication. This is why many twostroke cars had a switchable freewheel (quite what you know from a bicycle) My Jawa didn't have something like this but when I coasted for example downhill I periodically pulled the clutch and gave it a quick rev. Worked well for nearly 10 years.

Hi I'm from Hungary. We had to wait for 5 years to buy our first car the Trabant. 600cc 2 stroke air cooled engine ,top speed i did 120 km/h. Front wheel drive manual steering column gear shiftier. It always started even in -20 C cold. It had a Reserve tap inside ,for the fuel tank,never had to measure the fuel level. It was a great car. I was a TV Tech ,i could fit 3 CRT type TV-S ,when i took the front passenger seat out. It was great on Snow ,cause it was light and front wheel drive. It never broke down in the 10 years i was driving, just had to replace CV Joints once .

My dad bought me one of these in 1991, I guess as a practical joke. I drove it for two years. On the last journey I broke down on the autobahn near Kaiserslautern and a drunk driver in a big Merc stopped, turned around (on the motorway) and tried to jump start us. When that failed he towed me off the motorway at (literally) 100km/h. I almost shat myself because the car had never driven that fast before, especially not at a distance of 2 metres to the car in front. I survived. We scrapped the Trabbi after that.

Love your auto reviews Doug! Keep on bringing us new ones. I look forward to what you will find. Michael.

Drove a 1990 version of the Trabant a few days ago while doing NGO work in Romania...Doug is exaggerating a bit here in terms of what the car is and isnt imo .My version was the four stroke engine making about 40 horsepower. The 1990 version was a turn the key and go version unlike the older versions of the vehicle that Doug drove in this video. Was actually pleasantly surprised how well the car drove and its torque ratio. There were two of us in the car and I had no issues driving the car around town and getting to 50 mph..The brakes however are very strange in terms of stopping power( they felt like they would not stop car in time but they actually did.) I think what surprised me the most is that I could feel the German suspension tradition while driving the car. In other words the Trabant drove well, like a very rudimentary German car with tight decently tight driving dynamics. I drove a 2007 TDI Golf right after the Trabant and I made note how the VW had some of the same suspension characteristics as the Trabant..Anyway it was a very fun experience and as an American who had only seen these cars in the movies it was an extraordinary experience to drive one especially while in Eastern Europe in a former communist country..what a fun privilege it was!

The smoke was known in East Germany as "Trabbifurz" or Trabant fart.

"A man driving a Trabant suddenly breaks his windshield wiper. Pulling into a service station, he hails a mechanic. 'Wipers for a Trabi?' he asks. The mechanic thinks about it for a few seconds and replies, 'Yes, sounds like a fair trade." - Found that on Wikipedia

In west Germany there was a joke. " What is the most silent car in the world? --Its the Trabant, because you always have both knees on your ears!"

Whenever a german sees one of those in the streets, you either hit the recirculation button and close all windows or you enjoy the nostalgic smell of it.

Went on a Trabant tour of Berlin once: car broke down, tour company didn’t have a mechanic. I’d read about how easy these cars were to take apart and fix so I took the front wing and panels off, stripped the air filter and throttle out and fixed it with no tools. I am not a mechanic. I’m still a legend at work to this day.

We still have those driving around in Bulgaria. As well as the good old Wartburg as well. There's even a joke about it: - What is the longest car in the world? - A Trabant... if you count the smoke behind it.

It was a very and surprisingly capable car - when I was a kid a friend's of mine's dad was an owner of Trabant and took us with him off-road. The car handled it very well.

In Hungary, my mom learnt to drive one of these in 1992 while I was still in kindergarten. This was our family car, the only difference being the color, ours was green. My father was way into cars even before the regime change in 1991. Since Hungary was a Soviet satellite state, we had communism and if you wanted such a luxury as a car you had to write and submit a formal application to the government why you want it. My father got this car relatively fast after a two year wait period. Not kidding btw.

this is a perfect car for a bad naighborhood why? cuz noone will steal it and if he does you can catch him on foot

He said he got that one for 3000$?? WTF? In my country they get sold for 50$ -.-... a kid who got money from his mom to buy toys can afford one...

If forced to choose, I’d get a Russian Lada Niva. They are solid workhorses and are reliable off road vehicles. The Trabant is at best a city car. Completely old school and nothing about it really changed until the fall of the DDR. Nowadays the Zwickau factory that produced them was bought out by VW.

I had one just after the wall came down which I bought off an East German student. A nightmare to get insured in the UK. We have to have an MOT every year (a test to make sure it's roadworthy and the emissions are allowed). It failed on all these point, but I had a friend who worked in a garage and he passed it for me under strict instructions that I never drove it.

Q: Whats the longest car in the world? A: Trabant, 2 meter car, 10 meters of smoke. Q: How to stop a Trabant? A: Just put a gum on the road...

I had some family who lived in east Germany. They were unfortunately not rich enough to own this type of luxury car.

In Eastern Europe these are known as the worlds longest car - 6ft of actual car and another 350ft of smoke behind you.

"The easiest way to see how poorly this car is built is the panel gaps." Sounds like a Tesla.

1. Making fun of the *old* (like really old) Trabant is like making fun of a senile old man in a nursing home or a mentally impaired kid. 2. It wasn't nearly as bad as some ignoramuses think it is. For what it was designed it was actually pretty clever. Bear in mind most *west-Germans* still drove Volkswagen Type 1's at this time and they were designed in the 1930's. 3. They proved to be remarkably resilient and have an impressive longevity. If anything breaks it's really simple to fix or repair using simple tools. As a cheap people's car it certainly did the job.

"What gear is this in?" *SLAP* "WE will ask ze questions!!"

if Javascript was a car

You know, Trabant was probably not that bad, compared to some other beasts we had behind the Iron Curtain. Yes, it was slow, small, it smelled horribly, the brakes were crappy and it sounded rather irritably... But on the other hand, it was quite reliable and when it broke down, you could quite easily repair it yourself. A friend of mine once replaced the gearbox (which included removing the whole engine) on his own, in the street. (The engine together with the gearbox was ~80kg, so you could do it...) There were much better cars, but you had to either have quite a lot of money and be well-situated (have connections) or wait years to get one. Most people who had cars had crappy cars. But yeah, Trabant was a kinda joke even then. :-)

Fun fact, some dudes tried to go round the world trip with Trabants, I think they actually succeeded.. partly because you can fix it with a hammer

The lock system is low key genius, impossible to lock your keys in the car.

I don't care what people will say, I still adore this car. I wouldn't dare try driving it in rush hour traffic, but I love the design of it.

I think the Trabbi wasn't all that bad when it was introduced. In western Europe small two stroke engine cars were around as well. I think the idea behind the car was to use only few recources so anyone could afford it. So the doorlocks make sense this way. The major problem was that it didn't evolve. There are old tv ads for it where new "features" are presented. They just seem ridiculous. And even though only few recources were needed to make one you were waiting for over a decade as you ordered one.

Should have mentioned that most of these were actually made from fiber-reinforced polymers.

Doug is the type of guy who complains about the panel gaps on a Trabant.

I’m Hungarian and I grew up with Trabants. One thing you don’t know: we had no choice at that time. Also there was a party and my uncle got drunk, he had a fight with his brother in law and he cut his Trabant with a chainsaw because it’s made of paper.

Fun fact, under the Treuhand the leftovers of Trabant were sold off to VW & so in 1990 they actually put these babies out with a 4cyl VW engine to get rid of the remaining body parts. The remaining engine part for the 2-stroke were sold off for as spares, they didn’t conform to the environmental regulations of reunified Germany, so they didn’t want to put any new ones on the roads.