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Comment by Maro | Hacker News Reader

I'm Hungarian, born in '81, so I grew up around Trabis, Wartburgs, Skodas, Moskvitch, Ladas. My mom's first car was a Trabant. At some point in the 80s we moved to W-Germany for a few years and we took the Trabant, it was not a good look (we were living in Boeblingen, near Stuttgart, location of the Porsche HQ).

The magic of social and geographic mobility and the tech boom: today, 30 years later, I live in Dubai, where anything below V8 is boring, and my wife drives a Porsche, but really we should stop driving ICEs altogether.

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I grew up in East Germany, but i don't have any kind words to say about the Trabant; a small two-stroke engine (all East German engines were two stroke engines) that was quite bad to the environment (and to the poor guys who were frequently sick with some kind of asthma), what's so cool about that? (and the Chassis was made of pressed papier-mache, not even plastic; i have never seen one burning, but it would have been burning like a match)

I have seen one burning. On a hillside in (then) Czechoslovakia. The trabi overheated, then caught flame. Drivers got out, but the car was standing there, burning. We could not back up, because of a line of cars, trucks buses behind us who all were stuck on the very windy road.

Indeed it burned "like a match", with thick black smoke. When the breaks burned through it rolled downhill, towards us, scary AF. Luckily it did not hit us nor the car in front of us, but passed a few meters and ended in a ditch, below the road. Where it exploded: almost like in the movies; just more black smoke. No-one was hurt.

I was 12 or 13, but I remember the burning trabi like it was yesterday. I can almost feel the heat and smell the burning plastic, when I think of it.

The Trabant was made of Duroplast.

(1) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duroplast

The body panels are neither plain plastic nor paper-based, but more akin to Bakelite:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duroplast

The cardboard thing was more like a joke because (I guess) when banging against the panels it sounded like a cardboard box :)

Another popular name for the Trabant was 'Rennpappe' - 'racing cardboard'; but you are right, i mixed things up a bit.

I’ve seen one burning in the early nineties, it was abandoned and me and some friends lit it on fire… the paint bubbled up in some unhealthy ways on those paper parts. We pissed on it to put it out, be we failed. Got out there with our bikes pretty quick and later it was put out by the local fire brigade. :)

> we were living in Boeblingen, near Stuttgart

Grew up in Herrenberg (a few kilometers from Böblingen). When neighbors learned that my father was thinking of replacing his old Audi someone put a Mercedes calendar on our doorstep. Swabians are very particular with their cars.

My father grew up in Herrenberg (on "Auf'm Bildkäppele") and has never driven anything but Mercedes.

That's funny, I grew up about 100m away. Small world. :-)

Tübingen here... and working in Böblingen (or nowadays "for a company located in Böblingen").

Cool. When you commuted did you take the Ammertalbahn and S-Bahn, or did you drive? There was no high school in Herrenberg after the war, so my dad took the train to Tübingen every day and had to cross between the French and American zones of occupation.

Took the Ammertalbahn for a while, but it was extremely unreliable due to the known issues, so I switched to cycling (2x35km) which crazily turned out to be faster, more reliable and benefitial for my health as well.

There is a Mercedes research centre in Böblingen.

While I don't know how manufacturing is distributed today, historically the primary Mercedes production facility has been in Sindelfingen which is adjacent to Böblingen.

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