Monday, October 27, 2008

Trabant News

The Trabant is a true masterpiece of communist-era, East German engineering - rivaled only by the other automotive wonder from the GDR, the Wartburg.
The Trabant is an icon. It was produced for almost 30 years without any significant change in deisgn. The body of the car was "Duroplast" - a plastic material made from recycled cotton waste and resin.
I'm glad that there are still a lot of these cars around in Hungary, although there are less and less since they are out of production. If I had the money, I wouldn't mind getting an "eastern car" - but not a Trabant, preferably a Lada Niva.
I ran across a few news stories recently about these cars, so here goes:
  1. New Trabants
    A company in the eastern German state of Saxony (where the original Trabant was also produced) is developing a "grown-up version" of the famous Trabi, which will be introduced at the International Auto Show in Frankfurt in 2009.
    The car - called newTrabi will look very much like the original Trabant, but will comply with modern security and environmental standards. The newTrabi will also have a new 4-cylinder engine, and not the same two-stroke engine as the original.
    Click here to read the whole article.
  2. Trabant Boat
    This report was on CNN Video today:
  3. Original Trabant Commercial
    I found this on Youtube:
Long live the Trabant!

6 comments:

  1. Anonymous12:31 PM

    our first family car-in around 1991- was a 24year old blue trabant, that "bili-kék" type of blue, and we called him Törperős (one of the characters in hupikék Törpikék). he had fantastic horrible sound and our family plus my cousins used to cram into it and go visit my other aunts. that meant 2 adults in the front and 4 kids in the back...good ol' times :D i'm glad you like trabant:D

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  2. Those sound like good times!

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  3. Anonymous12:38 PM

    the commercial is hilarious, especially that it's in German :) I just keep watching it though I don't understand a word

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  4. Yea, I love this commercial too! "Schnell! Robust! Der neue Trabant sechshunderteins!" That's about all I understand from it.
    There is a really good one for the Wartburg on Youtube too.
    Do you have a blog Györgyi? If so, plz send the link!

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  5. don't have a blog yet, but it's on the way :) i will send over the link for sure

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  6. Cool - I'm looking forward to it!

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