6 ms·

30 Years On, the ‘Worst Car Ever Built’ Has a Fervent Fan Club

28 points by lermontov 7y ago

TheSpiceIsLife 7y ago
No fuel gauge, has dipstick in the tank. Tank is up front. Manual window washer pump. Wipers normal resting position is part the way up, obscuring view out the windscreen. 500 cc two stroke motor, later upgraded to 600cc Indicators don't cancel when the steering wheel returns to centre. Apparently there's still about 34,000 of them registered in Germany. ---- It hadn't occurred to me that early cars might have used two stroke engines. That would have made for some fairly disgusting city air.
- pedrocr 7y ago
  You can still buy cars with two stroke engines today. In Europe they're these mini cars sold to teenagers and old people because they don't require a full driving license.
  - detaro 7y ago
    I suspect even there two-stroke is getting rare, as it is in motorbikes. E.g. I think here in Germany it's basically impossible to get a new model of two-stroke vehicle licensed.
    - pedrocr 7y ago
      I'm thinking of these things: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quadricycle_(EU_vehicle_classification) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quadricycle_(EU_vehicle_clas... With a limitation of 50cc capacity a four-stroke may be hard. But they should all be replaced by the electric subclass very easily these days.
      - C1sc0cat 7y ago
        It still not quite there yet for all uses of a 50cc and its quite a bit more expensive eg the Vespa Electrica
    - phillc73 7y ago
      Two-stroke engines don't have to be environmentally a poorer choice than four-stoke engines. Evinrude's e-tec two-stroke outboard engines are quite popular and have received awards for low emission levels.[1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evinrude_Outboard_Motors https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evinrude_Outboard_Motors
      - TheSpiceIsLife 7y ago
        I wasn't aware of this: With direct fuel injection and a sump-based lubrication system, a two-stroke engine produces air pollution no worse than a four-stroke, and it can achieve higher thermodynamic efficiency. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-stroke_engine#Applications https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-stroke_engine#Applications
    - C1sc0cat 7y ago
      That's what I thought, you have not been able to buy a traditional two stroke scooter in the EU for several years now
  - TheSpiceIsLife 7y ago
    Interesting. I've tried a few searches and haven't found anything. Are you able to provide more information to refine my search, or do you know the names of any of these cars?
    - ahje 7y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quadricycle_(EU_vehicle_classification) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quadricycle_(EU_vehicle_classi...
    - ptaipale 7y ago
      The microcars over here in Finland are often brands Aixam or Ligier or, well, Microcar. These are French manufacturers. Top speed is limited to 45 km/h, and they are smaller than Trabant, but otherwise they resemble it in many respects. They cost as much as small real cars, and are vastly poorer in practically all respects (serviceability, fuel consumption, driveability, equipment, collision safety). Finnish government plans to enable "normal" cars to be equipped with speed limiters to 60 km/h so that a 16-year-old with a minicar license can drive them. EU is not happy.
      - TheSpiceIsLife 7y ago
        Thank you.
- raxxorrax 7y ago
  > That would have made for some fairly disgusting city air. Indeed. You can smell one of them for miles. Some say they like it but on the other hand some people sniff adhesives.
  - jwr 7y ago
    Also, you can see a trail of white smoke behind the car: fumes from the burned oil are white. [For the uninitiated: 2-stroke engines require adding oil to fuel, as there is no separate oil chamber, so when you fill up the tank, you need to add a pre-determined amount of oil]
    - bigiain 7y ago
      I dunno about Trabants, but one of my motorcycles is a two stroke (a Cagiva Mito) and except when it's cold and on the choke, you definitely can't see any smoke coming out it's exhaust. It's certainly burning the oil, it goes through about 1 litre of oil every 1000km or so. It runs an oil pump, so there's a separate tank for fuel and oil, and the pump mixes them before the carburetor.
    - TheSpiceIsLife 7y ago
      This isn't strictly true. As was pointed out to me elsewhere here today, Evinrude use a point-oiling system[1] that, combined with direct injection, results in air pollution no worse than a four-stroke, and it can achieve higher thermodynamic efficiency.[2] 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evinrude_Outboard_Motors https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evinrude_Outboard_Motors 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-stroke_engine#Emissions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-stroke_engine#Emissions
    - whenchamenia 7y ago
      I have a few 2 stroke bikes. Neither smoke while running, but the race engine can ocassionally burp a bit with rapid throttle changes. The stock 1970s engine does not even smoke on startup. I usually replace the auto-oilers with premix for reliability. If an oil-injection system fails, signifigant engine wear occurs.
  - 7y ago
Wyndtroy2012 7y ago
It was a terrible car in some (many) respects, but it definitely is not "the worst car ever built". The Trabi has a lot of things going on for it. 1. It is very light. The motor is tiny, the whole thing is like 600 kilos (not absolutely sure, but I know for a fact that 4 normal men can pick it up to move it to the side a bit). 2. Given its size, there is quite a bit of space inside 3. Since it is so small and light, it is very easy to drive. You literally don't need the clutch: there is a clutch pedal, but you don't need it -- you can switch gears as long as you are not pressing the gas pedal. (The gears, btw, are very light, and the "stick" is not a stick, it is on the wheel -- you can operate it with one finger without taking your hands off the wheel.) 4. With electronic ignition (it can be installed easily on top of the stock model) the motor behaves quite well. 5. It is cheap, not only because it is bad, but also because it is just cheap. Not many moving parts, nothing fancy in it, you get the point. I don't know how accessible spare parts are nowadays of course (this was the problem back in the day as well; finding spare parts was a bitch). It isn't a "good" car, given what we expect from cars these days, but for a city car it is quite OK. Still not as dirty as a diesel ;-) PS: there is an old Trabant joke that goes like this: a car collector from the US hears about it and wants to have one. He orders it and has it shipped over. On arrival, he looks at it in confusion, then writes back to the sender: "I wanted the car, not the toy model!"
- interfixus 7y ago
  In my far younger days I had the great good fortune to own a Morris Mini - the original doghouse, not the modern pastiche. That car did weigh 600 kg, and I happen to know for a fact that six men could easily pick it up and carry it a distance. I also know that it had a length of very close to 3 meters, and that the basement ramp where those six men put it was 3.10 meters wide. As they said when they fetched me, "You may wish to grab something to drink".
  - ptaipale 7y ago
    Many of us have done that to people like teachers who owned a Fiat 600 or 127.
magwas 7y ago
The trabi is a car specifically designed with a set of constraints: - to be cheap - to be easy to manufacture with no need of low tolerance parts - to be easy to repair without much equipment Those design goals were met perfectly. And the 2 stroke motor line designed by eastern german engineers for MZ bikes and Trabi is actually an engineering miracle of the time. The compression is partly achieved by the sound wave reflected by the exhaust.
- ptaipale 7y ago
  > The compression is partly achieved by the sound wave reflected by the exhaust. It's more a "backflow" than "sound wave", but yes, it's there. It's been standard in two-stroke engines for much longer than Trabi. And it's an invention from the national-socialist era. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expansion_chamber https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expansion_chamber
rerx 7y ago
Nitpick on one of the image captions: "A queue of Trabants passing Checkpoint Charlie on their way to West Berlin, November 1989." In the front I mostly see a couple of Wartburgs not Trabants. The Wartburg was East Germany's fancier "quality" car.
- safgasCVS 7y ago
  DAMMIT THIS WAS GOING TO BE MY COMMENT :D
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
IloveHN84 7y ago
I thought the Fiat Multipla was the worst ever
- ptaipale 7y ago
  No, it's merely a contender for the ugliest...
  - fredley 7y ago
    Ugly, but iconic.
    - ptaipale 7y ago
      Yes. It's to cars what "The Scream" is to paintings.
logicallee 7y ago
>Trabis had no fuel gauge, air conditioning, turn signals, or brake lights, and could only reach a maximum speed of 62 miles per hour. how can they have no fuel gauge? I can sort of understand how it is still operational with the rest, but does it just stop and run out of gas at some random time? does it start sputtering long enough for you to realize you need to make it into another gas station? this one has me stumped.
- pvg 7y ago
  There's a dipstick, like for oil.
- ptaipale 7y ago
  Most of the time you know your routine, and how much you've driven since filling up, and that tells you how much fuel you have left.
- jfk13 7y ago
  According to a comment above, there's a dipstick in the tank. Just need to remember to check it...
- GoToRO 7y ago
  You fill the tank, you know you can run for 500 kilometers. You know that your destination is 200km away. You can go and return on one tank. Also, the trips took much longer than today so people would stop to eat and relax at some point,and then you could also check the fuel. The main difference is that you knew what the range of the car is on one tank and the distance between cities. So you were more present and definitely not bored.
  - bigiain 7y ago
    Then one day, there's a 50kmh headwind on your way home... (Assuming a perfectly spherical cow of uniform density, if you drop the assumed 100kmh cruising speed down to 75kmh, giving an airspeed of 125kmh and a trip time of 2hr 40m at your ground speed of 75kmh, you'll run out of fuel precisely between the two most inconveniently placed gas stations at the bottom of a hill in both directions...)
glastra 7y ago
Check out the Jalopy videogame, where you own, drive and repair a car inspired by the Trabant.
- _iyig 7y ago
  Or in a similar vein, “My Summer Car:” https://youtu.be/r0IZ_TEzg7M https://youtu.be/r0IZ_TEzg7M
kvgr 7y ago
These guys basically travaled the world in them, not sure if those videos are available in English, but it is a lot of fun. http://tamazpet.transtrabant.cz/ http://tamazpet.transtrabant.cz/
frereubu 7y ago
I understand the interest in characterful cars like this, but the first thing that comes to mind when I hear about Trabants is car crash videos on YouTube where they're utterly obliterated by even a pretty minor crash with a modern car. Driving one of these outside of an area with low speed limits would give me the heebie jeebies.
lukaszkups 7y ago
I had a trabi too! It had even its own promo video :D https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q0uWKTVx_I8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q0uWKTVx_I8
runxel 7y ago
This car is also famous for being an asset in Half Life 2 – even tho you can never drive one of those beauties there...

28 points by lermontov 7y ago

No fuel gauge, has dipstick in the tank. Tank is up front. Manual window washer pump. Wipers normal resting position is part the way up, obscuring view out the windscreen. 500 cc two stroke motor, later upgraded to 600cc Indicators don't cancel when the steering wheel returns to centre. Apparently there's still about 34,000 of them registered in Germany. ---- It hadn't occurred to me that early cars might have used two stroke engines. That would have made for some fairly disgusting city air.

pedrocr 7y ago
You can still buy cars with two stroke engines today. In Europe they're these mini cars sold to teenagers and old people because they don't require a full driving license.
- detaro 7y ago
  I suspect even there two-stroke is getting rare, as it is in motorbikes. E.g. I think here in Germany it's basically impossible to get a new model of two-stroke vehicle licensed.
  - pedrocr 7y ago
    I'm thinking of these things: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quadricycle_(EU_vehicle_classification) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quadricycle_(EU_vehicle_clas... With a limitation of 50cc capacity a four-stroke may be hard. But they should all be replaced by the electric subclass very easily these days.
    - C1sc0cat 7y ago
      It still not quite there yet for all uses of a 50cc and its quite a bit more expensive eg the Vespa Electrica
  - phillc73 7y ago
    Two-stroke engines don't have to be environmentally a poorer choice than four-stoke engines. Evinrude's e-tec two-stroke outboard engines are quite popular and have received awards for low emission levels.[1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evinrude_Outboard_Motors https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evinrude_Outboard_Motors
    - TheSpiceIsLife 7y ago
      I wasn't aware of this: With direct fuel injection and a sump-based lubrication system, a two-stroke engine produces air pollution no worse than a four-stroke, and it can achieve higher thermodynamic efficiency. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-stroke_engine#Applications https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-stroke_engine#Applications
  - C1sc0cat 7y ago
    That's what I thought, you have not been able to buy a traditional two stroke scooter in the EU for several years now
- TheSpiceIsLife 7y ago
  Interesting. I've tried a few searches and haven't found anything. Are you able to provide more information to refine my search, or do you know the names of any of these cars?
  - ahje 7y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quadricycle_(EU_vehicle_classification) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quadricycle_(EU_vehicle_classi...
  - ptaipale 7y ago
    The microcars over here in Finland are often brands Aixam or Ligier or, well, Microcar. These are French manufacturers. Top speed is limited to 45 km/h, and they are smaller than Trabant, but otherwise they resemble it in many respects. They cost as much as small real cars, and are vastly poorer in practically all respects (serviceability, fuel consumption, driveability, equipment, collision safety). Finnish government plans to enable "normal" cars to be equipped with speed limiters to 60 km/h so that a 16-year-old with a minicar license can drive them. EU is not happy.
    - TheSpiceIsLife 7y ago
      Thank you.
raxxorrax 7y ago
> That would have made for some fairly disgusting city air. Indeed. You can smell one of them for miles. Some say they like it but on the other hand some people sniff adhesives.
- jwr 7y ago
  Also, you can see a trail of white smoke behind the car: fumes from the burned oil are white. [For the uninitiated: 2-stroke engines require adding oil to fuel, as there is no separate oil chamber, so when you fill up the tank, you need to add a pre-determined amount of oil]
  - bigiain 7y ago
    I dunno about Trabants, but one of my motorcycles is a two stroke (a Cagiva Mito) and except when it's cold and on the choke, you definitely can't see any smoke coming out it's exhaust. It's certainly burning the oil, it goes through about 1 litre of oil every 1000km or so. It runs an oil pump, so there's a separate tank for fuel and oil, and the pump mixes them before the carburetor.
  - TheSpiceIsLife 7y ago
    This isn't strictly true. As was pointed out to me elsewhere here today, Evinrude use a point-oiling system[1] that, combined with direct injection, results in air pollution no worse than a four-stroke, and it can achieve higher thermodynamic efficiency.[2] 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evinrude_Outboard_Motors https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evinrude_Outboard_Motors 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-stroke_engine#Emissions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-stroke_engine#Emissions
  - whenchamenia 7y ago
    I have a few 2 stroke bikes. Neither smoke while running, but the race engine can ocassionally burp a bit with rapid throttle changes. The stock 1970s engine does not even smoke on startup. I usually replace the auto-oilers with premix for reliability. If an oil-injection system fails, signifigant engine wear occurs.
- 7y ago

Wyndtroy2012 7y ago

It was a terrible car in some (many) respects, but it definitely is not "the worst car ever built". The Trabi has a lot of things going on for it. 1. It is very light. The motor is tiny, the whole thing is like 600 kilos (not absolutely sure, but I know for a fact that 4 normal men can pick it up to move it to the side a bit). 2. Given its size, there is quite a bit of space inside 3. Since it is so small and light, it is very easy to drive. You literally don't need the clutch: there is a clutch pedal, but you don't need it -- you can switch gears as long as you are not pressing the gas pedal. (The gears, btw, are very light, and the "stick" is not a stick, it is on the wheel -- you can operate it with one finger without taking your hands off the wheel.) 4. With electronic ignition (it can be installed easily on top of the stock model) the motor behaves quite well. 5. It is cheap, not only because it is bad, but also because it is just cheap. Not many moving parts, nothing fancy in it, you get the point. I don't know how accessible spare parts are nowadays of course (this was the problem back in the day as well; finding spare parts was a bitch). It isn't a "good" car, given what we expect from cars these days, but for a city car it is quite OK. Still not as dirty as a diesel ;-) PS: there is an old Trabant joke that goes like this: a car collector from the US hears about it and wants to have one. He orders it and has it shipped over. On arrival, he looks at it in confusion, then writes back to the sender: "I wanted the car, not the toy model!"

interfixus 7y ago
In my far younger days I had the great good fortune to own a Morris Mini - the original doghouse, not the modern pastiche. That car did weigh 600 kg, and I happen to know for a fact that six men could easily pick it up and carry it a distance. I also know that it had a length of very close to 3 meters, and that the basement ramp where those six men put it was 3.10 meters wide. As they said when they fetched me, "You may wish to grab something to drink".
- ptaipale 7y ago
  Many of us have done that to people like teachers who owned a Fiat 600 or 127.

magwas 7y ago

The trabi is a car specifically designed with a set of constraints: - to be cheap - to be easy to manufacture with no need of low tolerance parts - to be easy to repair without much equipment Those design goals were met perfectly. And the 2 stroke motor line designed by eastern german engineers for MZ bikes and Trabi is actually an engineering miracle of the time. The compression is partly achieved by the sound wave reflected by the exhaust.

ptaipale 7y ago
> The compression is partly achieved by the sound wave reflected by the exhaust. It's more a "backflow" than "sound wave", but yes, it's there. It's been standard in two-stroke engines for much longer than Trabi. And it's an invention from the national-socialist era. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expansion_chamber https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expansion_chamber

rerx 7y ago

Nitpick on one of the image captions: "A queue of Trabants passing Checkpoint Charlie on their way to West Berlin, November 1989." In the front I mostly see a couple of Wartburgs not Trabants. The Wartburg was East Germany's fancier "quality" car.

safgasCVS 7y ago
DAMMIT THIS WAS GOING TO BE MY COMMENT :D
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]

IloveHN84 7y ago

I thought the Fiat Multipla was the worst ever

ptaipale 7y ago
No, it's merely a contender for the ugliest...
- fredley 7y ago
  Ugly, but iconic.
  - ptaipale 7y ago
    Yes. It's to cars what "The Scream" is to paintings.

logicallee 7y ago

>Trabis had no fuel gauge, air conditioning, turn signals, or brake lights, and could only reach a maximum speed of 62 miles per hour. how can they have no fuel gauge? I can sort of understand how it is still operational with the rest, but does it just stop and run out of gas at some random time? does it start sputtering long enough for you to realize you need to make it into another gas station? this one has me stumped.

pvg 7y ago
There's a dipstick, like for oil.
ptaipale 7y ago
Most of the time you know your routine, and how much you've driven since filling up, and that tells you how much fuel you have left.
jfk13 7y ago
According to a comment above, there's a dipstick in the tank. Just need to remember to check it...
GoToRO 7y ago
You fill the tank, you know you can run for 500 kilometers. You know that your destination is 200km away. You can go and return on one tank. Also, the trips took much longer than today so people would stop to eat and relax at some point,and then you could also check the fuel. The main difference is that you knew what the range of the car is on one tank and the distance between cities. So you were more present and definitely not bored.
- bigiain 7y ago
  Then one day, there's a 50kmh headwind on your way home... (Assuming a perfectly spherical cow of uniform density, if you drop the assumed 100kmh cruising speed down to 75kmh, giving an airspeed of 125kmh and a trip time of 2hr 40m at your ground speed of 75kmh, you'll run out of fuel precisely between the two most inconveniently placed gas stations at the bottom of a hill in both directions...)

glastra 7y ago

Check out the Jalopy videogame, where you own, drive and repair a car inspired by the Trabant.

_iyig 7y ago
Or in a similar vein, “My Summer Car:” https://youtu.be/r0IZ_TEzg7M https://youtu.be/r0IZ_TEzg7M

kvgr 7y ago

These guys basically travaled the world in them, not sure if those videos are available in English, but it is a lot of fun. http://tamazpet.transtrabant.cz/ http://tamazpet.transtrabant.cz/

frereubu 7y ago

I understand the interest in characterful cars like this, but the first thing that comes to mind when I hear about Trabants is car crash videos on YouTube where they're utterly obliterated by even a pretty minor crash with a modern car. Driving one of these outside of an area with low speed limits would give me the heebie jeebies.

lukaszkups 7y ago

I had a trabi too! It had even its own promo video :D https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q0uWKTVx_I8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q0uWKTVx_I8

runxel 7y ago

This car is also famous for being an asset in Half Life 2 – even tho you can never drive one of those beauties there...