The Trabant Is the Best Commie Car Made of Cotton We've Ever Driven
jalopnik.com
jalopnik.com
There was a soviet joke about this. A man goes to the car dealer, and asks for an appointment to buy a car. The salesman replies sure, come in 10 years. "Right, but in the morning or the afternoon?" inquires the man. "Is it really important, in 10 years time?" asks the surprised salesman. "Well, you see, the plumber already gave me an appointment for the morning".
Because it was so lightweight, my father could once bring a replacement door in public transport without breaking a sweat. And because it was so simple, he could put it in in half an hour without any prior training as a car mechanic.
If not for the antiquated 2-stroke engine and lack of exhaust filters, it could still be an example for very good, cost efficient and environment friendly engineering.
Dial back your econonsense, please. I was made like it was because East Germany was broke as hell and could not produce much of anything...
As an example of working within the constraints of the time while preserving the core functions of a car it was a good example, yes from the point of view of western equivalents of the same era they are laughable but western cars didn't have the same constraints.
I'd personally like to see what a modern car would look like if you went in the same direction, given the constraints of it must be a functional car and must pass crash test/emission standards whats the most pared back/reliable car we can build.
Not because anyone would buy them but because it would be interesting engineering.
I grew up in the 80's in the UK, back then cars very very rarely had AC, Electric Windows, Heated Seats etc, you wound the window down and if you where posh opened the sunroof, same with automatic gearboxes (though they are still very rare here, they simply never caught on).
Just as side note. The constraints the soviets had were all self made, as the article also mentions. They had all the elements from the periodic table at their disposal, large reserves of oil and natural gas, endless fields of nutrient rich soil.
Dacia is probably a car you want to investigate as a more car like specimen.
But Smart, or even Renault Elektro is following the spirit of Trabant more closely.
The Nissan Verso undercuts it, selling in the US for $13,000 (including delivery fees and such). Manual trans, crank windows, with AC. It's also considerably more spacious without sacrificing too much fuel mileage.
Manual transmission is the norm here anyway and crank windows are just an annoyance, but AC is possibly better for your health than open windows when used carefully.
* gravity costs less than a fuel pump and it rarely breaks so does not need replacement
* recycled material usually costs less than new material, esp. when you consider garbage disposal costs
* less moving parts and parts than can be repaired by amateurs mean less parts overall which means less costs and waste
I don't doubt that they would fail modern crash tests but even that is relative: If everyone is driving a slow "deathtrap" your chances of getting into a high speed crash with a fast moving tank are pretty low.
The engine is just a scaled up version of the motorcycles my brothers and I drove as kids in the late 70s / early 80s. Of course, 500cc is a little bigger than 250, 100 or 80 cc :-)
I don't discount the elegance of the solution in its own context. The comment If not for the antiquated 2-stroke engine and lack of exhaust filters, it could still be an example for very good, cost efficient and environment friendly engineering. is quite mad, however.
You literally seem to have no idea how any of this works
Those cars are constantly broken. They leak everything everywhere. Serviceability by amateurs goes directly against low emissions. You can't make a clean, 4-stroke engine without high fuel pressure. Modern engines require unimaginable tolerances.
Recycled material is almost always more expensive than non-recycled one, why do you think recycling needs to be forced by law? Eastern Germany had shortages of materials so they literally used anything they could. Do you really think it was inert and harmless? For e.g. soviet bloc used heavily carcinogenic cleaning agent in preschools, hospitals etc.
Sure, you can drop bells and whistles like electric windshields, infotaiment and the like.
There's a couple of places in town that will buy metal.
Or is scrap metal somehow not recycling?
> Your chances of being maimed in that cardboard box even in a minor city crash are high, it literally is a deathtrap.
I would still argue, when on a bicycle, your survival chances when crashing into a bicycle are higher than when crashing into a car. Same goes for Trabant vs Trabant. Do you have some concrete evidence that Trabant does worse here (i.e. design issues that prevented people from getting out or that turn some parts into lethal weapons when involved in a "minor city crash")?
> Those cars are constantly broken. They leak everything everywhere.
At least not my family's Trabant or those of our friends. Do you have any actual numbers on failure rates?
> Serviceability by amateurs goes directly against low emissions. You can't make a clean, 4-stroke engine without high fuel pressure. Modern engines require unimaginable tolerances.
That is a very bold statement only backed by a comparison that does not even apply (a modern 4-stroke engine design vs the used 2-stroke engine). But since 2-stroke engines benefit greatly from direct injection I'll let that pass and just notice that I was not talking about the engine specifically but the overall design and that I even pointed out that the engine they used was "antiquated".
> Recycled material is almost always more expensive than non-recycled one
Do you have any numbers to back that up? And here I'd like to have a breakdown to see where the costs are coming from. In a planned economy it is much easier and cheaper to source recycled or scrapped material (i.e: You know you need 10ton of cotton wool to make X goods in a factory and you also know that you have to scrap 0.5tons. Therefore you just plan on having 0.5tons for further use and collect that with a truck once a month.)
> Eastern Germany had shortages of materials so they literally used anything they could. Do you really think it was inert and harmless? For e.g. soviet bloc used heavily carcinogenic cleaning agent in preschools, hospitals etc.
You won. I'm completely traumatized by ~"carcinogens in preschools and hospitals". Well, maybe not, because that was not the topic at all (but I can give you many more great examples of what was utterly wrong if you need them for further "arguments" - after all, I grew up there). I don't care why we use resources as efficient as possible as long as we do it. Now people carry proper fabric shopping bags "because of the environment1!!!1!". Before there was this joke in Western Germany: "How do you spot someone from Eastern Germany? He is carrying a fabric shopping bag!".
> why do you think recycling needs to be forced by law?
Because the elected representatives think that the majority wants to protect the environment. Or in other words: Because we have arrived at a point where people think it is important to use resources as efficiently as possible. I don't see the importance of why people want to save resources as long as they do it.
You said "it is ecological at heart concept"
1)can't be ecological with 2 stroke engine, EVER
You said "it is great to be serviceable by amateurs"
2) From 1) follows lack of "fixable with whatever".
You need high fuel pressure for good atomization and efficient burn, you need precise tolerances, you need high-grade materials for the engine to not burn fuel like crazy and not produce all kinds of nasty shit. One could go on for hours
Wikipedia claims: The engine produced very smoky exhaust and significant air pollution – nine times the hydrocarbons and five times the carbon monoxide emissions of the average European car of 2007.
Great ecology.
Another point of gravity fuel feed: guess where the tank is - directly above an aircooled engine. Top marks for safety
On the topic of safety: Yes, being hit by a modern car might actually be safer on a bike than in that thing. Sure as fuck I'd personally prefer that if it was compared to motorbike + clothes.
You might burn. The steering column might impale you. The steering wheel might take your head off. That thing literally folds on itself. It isn't speed that kills you but being crushed into a funny looking ball
The carcirogenic part was just highlight one problem. They used waste from dye production. Do you think anyone even bothered to check how toxic it is? Do you really think that waste from a soviet plant is harmless? They used it because they had no other materials available.
That sweet eco-touchy-feely recycled duroplast? Turns out you can't really dispose of it. (They ground it up and mixed it as aggregate in cement for pavement construction)
About recycling: I meant it has to be required because it usually isn't worth it (especially for normal people, not buisnesses that happen to have it by the tonne)
http://www.businessinsider.com/low-oil-prices-hurt-plastics-...
Sure, I can use fabric shopping bags. Just to buy trash bags instead, but whatever makes you feel nice. Most of the time the supermarkets make me use a gazyllion shitty plastic bags for every single loose thing (self-weighting) anyway.
This is perhaps because of lack of competition (there wasn't much common market even between different Warsaw Pact countries) and overspending on military preparing for wars which never came.
http://jalopnik.com/these-were-your-car-options-in-hungary-u... this article makes the point that there was some competition. Lucky for Hungary. In USSR there were not.
It then fell off a cliff.
Also the funny part is that the late east german politbureau was driving Volvo cars, eastern block cars weren't good enough for them...
This is an east german car magazine episode from 1982, introducing the new model's features: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ynxQF3pd-I
Spoof by a german comedian: http://funpot.net/?id=d2c15d587110bcfa
Btw. there was no heating in Trabant...