Our Trabant P601 Limousine's
First Public Display
First Public Display
Visitors to the Classic & Vintage Weekend on Sunday 26th April were amongst the first to see our fascinating Trabant P601 on display and in use. If you lived or travelled in eastern Europe before the Iron Curtain came down, you will certainly have encountered Trabants in their thousands. The Trabant was the most common vehicle in the German Democratic Republic (as the far from democratic East Germany was then called), where it was built, and it was widely exported within the communist bloc to Bulgaria, Poland, Romania, Hungary, Yugoslavia and the USSR. In those pre-unification times, if you aspired to buy a new car you put your name down on a list and, many years later - perhaps as many as twelve - a new Trabant might be allocated to you. The process could, perhaps, be speeded up a little if you signed up as a communist party member.
Trabants were built in Zwickau, in the Saxony province of East Germany, by VEB Sachsenring Automobilwerke Zwickau. Their main selling points were that they could carry four adults plus baggage whilst being compact, light and durable, and they were built, without much change in specification, between 1957 and 1991. The Trabant has gone down in popular culture for its poor performance, although it could struggle up to 70 mph given the right conditions, and it was renowned for its extremely smoky and smelly, small twin cylinder, two-stroke, air-cooled 595cc engine. Famed for the pollution that it caused, it produced nine times the amount of hydrocarbons and five times the carbon monoxides that the average European car spews out today. From a maintenance point of view the car was simplicity itself, having no radiator, water pump, petrol pump or distributor, and it needed only minimum looking after with simple tools and unskilled labour.
Its body construction was noteworthy to say the least. Although the basic structure was of steel monocoque design, large sections of it including the roof, bonnet, boot lid, doors and bumpers were all made of a material called Duroplast. This was a type of plastic combining resin strengthened by wool or cotton waste, and occasionally even paper, mostly imported from Russia and mixed with phenol resin which was a by-product from the East German dye industry. It was, in fact, the first car with a body made of recycled material.
Our 'Trabi' has its own little niche in world history. It was built in 1989 and was licensed by the East German authorities on 9th of November that year, the very day that the Berlin Wall came down, turning the tide on a whole way of life in eastern Europe and bringing in its wake an instant collapse in Trabant sales with far superior second-hand cars from the west now becoming readily available. It was purchased ten years later for £100 by Eoin Cullen with the help of a German friend from a family who had owned it from new, and it was only when they were having a celebration beer in a bar later that they realised the significance of the date of its registration. Used by Eoin daily to drive him to work in Berlin, it always started every time, and although it struggled a little in winter this could be overcome by drying the spark plugs on the radiators in his flat overnight.
After being driven to the UK in 2001, via the Hamburg-Harwich ferry, our Trabant was kept in a garage at Leamington Spa but has never been issued with a British number plate which, in view of its comparatively recent date of manufacture, would require the fitment of rear seat belts, indicator repeaters on the front wings and masking of headlights for left side dipping. We arranged for it to be brought to Carlton on a low loader and it arrived here on Tuesday 23rd September. In tentative runs around the site soon afterwards, it proved an immediate 'hit' with visitors although the front bumper fell off fairly promptly, the brackets having rusted through which was hardly a surprise as they are less than 1mm thick! In Europe - and Germany in particular - the quirky Trabant has now become quite a cult car with over 150 Trabant Clubs listed in Germany alone. Every year in June there is a huge rally in Zwickau which attracts up to 2,000 of them. Ours will be on show to the public this year for them to see what motoring in the communist era was like.
Trabants were built in Zwickau, in the Saxony province of East Germany, by VEB Sachsenring Automobilwerke Zwickau. Their main selling points were that they could carry four adults plus baggage whilst being compact, light and durable, and they were built, without much change in specification, between 1957 and 1991. The Trabant has gone down in popular culture for its poor performance, although it could struggle up to 70 mph given the right conditions, and it was renowned for its extremely smoky and smelly, small twin cylinder, two-stroke, air-cooled 595cc engine. Famed for the pollution that it caused, it produced nine times the amount of hydrocarbons and five times the carbon monoxides that the average European car spews out today. From a maintenance point of view the car was simplicity itself, having no radiator, water pump, petrol pump or distributor, and it needed only minimum looking after with simple tools and unskilled labour.
Its body construction was noteworthy to say the least. Although the basic structure was of steel monocoque design, large sections of it including the roof, bonnet, boot lid, doors and bumpers were all made of a material called Duroplast. This was a type of plastic combining resin strengthened by wool or cotton waste, and occasionally even paper, mostly imported from Russia and mixed with phenol resin which was a by-product from the East German dye industry. It was, in fact, the first car with a body made of recycled material.
Our 'Trabi' has its own little niche in world history. It was built in 1989 and was licensed by the East German authorities on 9th of November that year, the very day that the Berlin Wall came down, turning the tide on a whole way of life in eastern Europe and bringing in its wake an instant collapse in Trabant sales with far superior second-hand cars from the west now becoming readily available. It was purchased ten years later for £100 by Eoin Cullen with the help of a German friend from a family who had owned it from new, and it was only when they were having a celebration beer in a bar later that they realised the significance of the date of its registration. Used by Eoin daily to drive him to work in Berlin, it always started every time, and although it struggled a little in winter this could be overcome by drying the spark plugs on the radiators in his flat overnight.
After being driven to the UK in 2001, via the Hamburg-Harwich ferry, our Trabant was kept in a garage at Leamington Spa but has never been issued with a British number plate which, in view of its comparatively recent date of manufacture, would require the fitment of rear seat belts, indicator repeaters on the front wings and masking of headlights for left side dipping. We arranged for it to be brought to Carlton on a low loader and it arrived here on Tuesday 23rd September. In tentative runs around the site soon afterwards, it proved an immediate 'hit' with visitors although the front bumper fell off fairly promptly, the brackets having rusted through which was hardly a surprise as they are less than 1mm thick! In Europe - and Germany in particular - the quirky Trabant has now become quite a cult car with over 150 Trabant Clubs listed in Germany alone. Every year in June there is a huge rally in Zwickau which attracts up to 2,000 of them. Ours will be on show to the public this year for them to see what motoring in the communist era was like.
27th April 2009
