Trabant in Longmont

I saw this Trabant driving down Hover street in Longmont the other day.

Never expected to see one of these on the road all the way over here!

New Trabant Unveiled

A while back I wrote a post about how a new Trabant - the Neue Trabant or nT - has been in the works.
On Wednesday the New Trabant was unveiled at the Frankfurt Motor Show. Here's the video:

The new Trabant has very little in common with its blue-smoke belching, 2-stroke engined, paper mache bodied predecessor, other than its name and body shape. The designers of the Neue Trabant claim it is all about being economical and ecological. It is an electric car, and has solar panels on the roof, which power the air conditioning.

The nT is still only a concept car, so we probably won't be seeing any on the road anytime soon, but even if the Neue Trabant goes into mass production, I think it will never have the same cult following as the original Trabant, because it's just too nice. People love things which are awesomely bad, and this car just seems too good!

Zbogom, Yugo!

It is the end of an era.
The Zastava auto plant in Kragujevac, Serbia stopped production of the Yugo car last Thursday.

Its kind of hard to be sad about this, considering that I had just assumed they stopped making Yugos a long time ago - kind of like when Ronald Reagan died; I was sad, but I was mostly surprised that he had actually still been alive until then! Like 6 months before his death I even asked someone - Hey, Ronald Reagan already passed away, right? And they said - Yea, I think so...
Turns out that they've been making Yugos (although less and less) all the way up until last Thursday, which means that the Yugo not only outlived the Trabant, it also outlived the country it was named after!

Production of the Yugo began in 1981, and for much of its lifetime, the Yugo was the cheapest car in the world - the 2007 models cost about €3500 new.
One of my aunts in California used to drive a Yugo. I remember riding around in it. It was kind of like being in a small Suzuki, just more uncomfortable.

The Zastava factory has signed an agreement with Fiat - Fiat will fix up the factory which was damaged by NATO bombing, and will be producing 2 new Fiat models, possibly up to 200,000 a year by 2010.
You can be sure though that the Yugo will not be quickly forgotten - there are still quite a few on the streets in Hungary and its estimated that 1 in 3 people in Serbia have owned a Yugo at some time in their life!
Even the Deputy Prime Minister of Serbia has a Yugo, and did an interview with the BBC while driving it in downtown Belgrade. Here's the video.

The biggest problem with the Yugo being gone, is that all the jokes about them will not pass on to future generations. In that sense, this is a great loss for humanity.
Here are some Yugo jokes to help you say goodbye to the Yugoslav wonder:

• Why does a Yugo have a defroster on the rear window? To keep your hands warm while you push it.
• What do you call a Yugo's shock absorbers? Passengers.
• The new Yugo has an air bag. Before an accident, start pumping real fast.
• How do you double the value of a Yugo? Fill the gas tank.
• What do you call a Yugo at the top of a hill? A miracle.

How do you feel about the end of the Yugo era?

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!