Trabant - Overview

Overview

The name, meaning 'satellite' or 'companion' in German, was inspired by Soviet Sputnik. The cars are often referred to as the Trabbi or Trabi, pronounced /ˈtrɑːbi/ TRAH-bee in English.

Due to the long waiting period between ordering a Trabant and actually taking delivery (in some cases years passed as scarce materials were obtained), people who finally received one treated the car gently and were meticulous in maintaining and repairing it. The lifespan of an average Trabant was 28 years. Used Trabants would often fetch a higher price than new ones, as the former were available immediately, while the latter required the infamous long wait.

There were four principal variants of the Trabant:

• the P50, also known as the Trabant 500, produced 1957–1962
• the Trabant 600, produced 1962–1964
• the Trabant 601, produced 1963–1991
• the Trabant 1.1, produced 1990–1991 with a 1,043 cc (63.6 cu in) VW engine (making the "1.1" a slight misnomer)

The engine for the 500, 600, and original 601 was a small two-stroke engine with two cylinders, giving the vehicle modest performance. At the end of production in 1989 the Trabant delivered 19 kW (26 horsepower) from a 600 cc (37 cu in) displacement. The car took 21 seconds from 0 to 100 km/h (62 mph); the top speed was 112 km/h (70 mph) with an official top speed of 100 km/h. There were two main problems with the engine: the smoky exhaust and the pollution it produced – nine times the hydrocarbons and five times the carbon monoxide emissions of the average European car of 2007. The fuel consumption was 7 l/100 km (40 mpg; 34 mpg). Since the engine did not have an oil injection system, two-stroke oil had to be added to the 24-litre (6.3 U.S. gal; 5.3 imp gal) fuel tank every time the car was filled up, at a 50:1 or 33:1 ratio of fuel to oil. Gas stations of the time in countries where two-stroke engines were common served premixed gas-oil mixture from the pump. Today, owners normally carry a container of two-stroke oil in the car for this purpose. Because the car lacked a fuel pump, the fuel tank was placed high up in the engine compartment so that fuel could be fed to the carburetor by gravity; a trade-off of this design was an increased fire risk in front-end accidents. Earlier models had no fuel gauge; a dipstick was inserted into the tank to determine how much fuel remained.

The Trabant was a steel monocoque design with roof, bootlid/trunklid, bonnet/hood, bumpers/fenders, and doors in Duroplast. Duroplast was a hard plastic (similar to Bakelite) made of recycled materials: cotton waste from the Soviet Union and phenol resins from the East German dye industry, making the Trabant the first car with a body made of recycled material. The results of some crash tests showed it performed better than some contemporary Western hatchbacks. The Trabant was the second car to use Duroplast, after the "pre-Trabant" P70 (Zwickau) model (1954–1959).

Production of the Trabant reached 3.7 million vehicles on 30 April 1991.