More Electric Trabant Talk - dull dull dull

September 9, 2009

Another press release of an electric Trabant, it seems there are new details on this nearly every month.   What started as a “retro-Trabant” in the style of the “retro-MINI” and “retro-Beetle” and “retro-Fiat500″ (you get the current car trend here?) a couple of years ago with Herpa joining up with IndieKar to produce a new Trabant has now turned into an electric car dream.

I think there is a lot of hype over all this, yet another electric car idea that will get nowhere.   Electric cars have been played with for over 30 years, by now with all the promises we should all be driving electric cars but along with those promised robots and silver all-on-one suits that they told us we would have in the future, we still don’t have an electric car mass produced.   There is a pretty good reason for it too.  Electric cars cost a lot and are heavy.  They are slow and they don’t go very far until you run out of power.  They are suited to  in-town driving, and yet we are told to use public transport instead of cars within towns in order to reduce congestion.  They are hardly green, with chemical batteries and very high “carbon footprint” on the generation and usage of electric they must be thought of as pretty much polluting (hey, my all electric house hold heating is ungreen I am told, so why not a car running off the same ‘fuel’?).   So, no-body wants electric cars apart from politions who see it as a good short sighted vote winner.  I wish then the idea of an electric retro Trabant would be stopped then too.

The car planned is Trabant in name and…. well that is about it.   No simple construction and design (2stroke engines never go wrong!), no cheap price (well I tell a lie as pricing is never mentioned but I can only assume that it will be expensive).  So no “people’s car” idea which is really what the Trabant was all about, the East’s VW Beetle.  This is something that the manuafactuers of these retro cars always miss.  The thing that made the car a success in the first place was the availability to the everyday person, the “people’s car”.  A brand new retro Mini, Beetle, Fiat 500 will cost you a lot of money.  A brand new retro Trabant then, most likely, will cost a lot of money with or without a battery pack underneath.    But at least the idea of the plastic body has been kept, although how that is made has not been announced.  So the old Duroplast that Trabant panels were made of, a material made from factory waste and so you could say is pretty eco friendly if you wish to think that way, will be replaced with a yet unknown plastic.  Like Duroplast, the new plastic will take millions of years to decompose, but unlike Durplast it will not be made from that factory waste.

The new electric Trabant will have solar panels (a currently expensive and over complex, and so maybe not quite so eco friendly, way of making electricity) and various ports for Ipods and satnavs.  There is no mention of really anything else.   This then is “yet another electric car” that just so happens to have the name “Trabant” attached to it which itself gives it a bit of a marketing wow as they are taking “the worlds worst polluting car” to a “green car”.  Well, both statements there I would certainly challenge.

So we have to with the IndieKar/Herpa partnership luck as Trabant car this will not be, both in ideal and looks.  Watch out 2012 as they hope to have it on the road for then, but don’t be suprised if it is never seen.

Now, for a true electric Trabant that is on the road now, take a look at http://www.flickr.com/photos/anachrocomputer/sets/72157604747849759/

Related Posts:

• February 26, 2008 -- A Pig of a Car - a Trabant?
• January 30, 2008 -- New Trabant on the News
• January 29, 2008 -- Herpa Making Model “New Trabants”
• October 12, 2009 -- Bo Nanafana Social Club - Cold War Night 14th Nov in Norwich
• March 9, 2009 -- Communism Night - BBC2 14th March