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Comment by augstein | Hacker News Reader

I'm from West-Germany and have driven a Trabant myself (only twice though). This video, titled "The Trabant Was an Awful Car Made By Communists" from Doug De Muro sums it up quite nicely imo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=No1-4GsQa-g ;-)

The fact that they still sold this dangerous and noisy contraption in the late eighties (you even had to wait years to get one), when Audi released the V8 (4C) and Mercedes was about to end production for the S-Class W126, tells you a lot about how broken transportation was in East-Germany.

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Well Audi V8 and Mercedes S klasse are not exactly people's cars.

How different is pricing in Germany for an MB, BMW or VAG product? Are those vehicles much cheaper in DE or is the income “floor” much higher relatively to North America?

Last time I checked, these brands are more expensive in Germany than the US. They are even cheaper in other EU countries, to the point exporting the papers to have them registered in a third EU country is a thing. These re-imports are usually a good deal.

Having owned BMWs in both Europe and the US, I can definitely attest to the much lower cost - both absolute and as a proportion of software developer income - in the US of an equivalent model (though ten model years apart). That said, I believe the US models are made here and not in Germany.

If I remember well, the X5 (?) sold in Europe is produced in the US as well.

I think it's worth appreciating the resource constraints under which the Trabant was developed. The questionable technical choices weren't made out of socialist incompetence but because certain materials were hard to come by and practically every citizen was eligible to request one.

While the Western Allies quickly changed their post-war plans to build up Germany as a military base against the Soviet Union for the impending Cold War and the US offered Germany loans for their surplus resources, the Soviet Union initially sought to deindustrialize Germany for reparations to rebuild its own infrastructure that had faced massive destruction by Germany throughout the war.

Additionally unlike the Western Allies, the Soviet Union had only just barely experienced its own industrial revolution and was still largely agrarian until it shifted gears to produce for war. And while an important strategic partner, East Germany spent most of its existence as a puppet state, stuck between producing commodities for its own population, producing export goods that could only be sold at a massive loss and supporting the Soviet side of the Cold War while facing constant provocations from NATO and the US.

In fact, the most valuable "export" for East Germany were West German spies and "collaborators", whom the West German government routinely paid large ransoms for.

EDIT: Deleted the last paragraph speculating about what might have happened if East Germany had continued to exist because that's probably off-topic and requires a more thorough understanding of late East German politics.

EDIT2: To clarify, I'm mostly pointing these things out because the video the parent posted is infuriatingly light on details while just constantly mocking obvious UX or quality issues. The presenter doesn't seem to know much about the car itself and instead tries to give a strained Jeremy Clarkson impression. There's no historical context given (other than "it's a communist car") and it barely even describes any technical aspects other than what would be obvious to any layperson. Contrast this with this Forgotten Weapons video about a horrible mess of a gun that ruined the company that made it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9bULArrKs4

"Constant provocations from NATO and the US"? The following wiki article goes into great depth on the insane amount of time and money the DDR invested in making sure that its citizens could not escape:

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

Oh, sorry, I meant "unannounced military drills occasionally violating Soviet airspace and waters".

I'm not sure what the fact that the DDR was an authoritarian police state that routinely incarcerated and tortured citizens accused of collaboration, shot anyone trying to illegally cross the border into the West, and employed ordinary citizens to keep taps on each other under constant paranoia of collaboration has to do with this, though. There's a reason I put "collaborators" in scare quotes. These things are well-known, even outside Germany.

I didn't say the DDR was good. I said it faced extreme resource constraints and that it was under constant pressure from Moscow, while also trying to provide commodity goods to every citizen. "Stupid communists built bad cars" isn't a very interesting or informed take, though.

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