Retro Trabant
September 13, 2007
There has been plenty of talk of the new proposed "Retro Trabant" on the various Trabant and IFA forums! Herpa, the German toy car company, showed a proposed model of the new car based and using the same name as the East German Trabant, at the Frankfurt Motor Show. They sell 100,000 model Trabants a year and so it seems they believe there might be interest in a modern real car. People get emotional over the Trabant, would they get the same emotion from a modern retro version.
It's all "retro" these days with cars, the Beetle, the MINI, the look and feel of a lot of the modern cars have a retro feeling, and so this is following the current trend. Trabants were made between 1957 in Zwickau and production only stopped in 1991 due to the influx of much better quality cars coming from the West. I wouldn't blame someone for wanting to swap their much cherished Trabant for a quiet and ecomonical VW Polo or Golf if I had the chance, as part of the free and rich West that everyone craved for. Mind you, something about the Trabant was done right as there were only very minor changes to the design throughout its history, right up until the end when the biggest change was to remove the 2-stroke engine and pop in a VW unit instead.
So would the new Trabant have the latest in VW engine design and plastic panels? Would it come in a small selection of colours and you won't have a choice of which you get. Likewise, will they come with "deluxe" extras that you pay extra for but you won't actually know until delivery day which extras you get - would you hope for the two tone paint work or the heated rear windscreen 
It's all fun to think about, I doubt anything will come from it, and if it did the only thing in common with a Trabant will be its name and the hope that it was built in Zwickau (Herpa is looking for a company to produce these cars in the Saxony region, and so keeping the VEB Sachsenring Automobilwerke Zwickau link. Mind you, BMW is not too pleased with the idea, suggesting that some of the design ideas have come from them. But then, BMW has it's own history with IFA and all things Eastern-Bloc car-like.
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