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Powered by smelly two-stroke engines giving just 26 bhp, Trabants were basic transport for the masses in East Germany, where people had to wait years to own one. Austerely equipped, their boxy two-door bodies were built from a substance called Duraplast, an East German version of glassfibre which was actually more akin to cardboard. There were saloons, estates and a military-style open-topped version called the 'Tramp', which had cut-away doors and pieces of rope to stop the occupants falling out on corners. VW eventually bought the factory and offered the final cars for sale with more environmentally-friendly Polo engines.
Flooding east-to-west across the border of a newly unified Germany, the Trabant became a symbol of crumbling communist regimes in the late '80s and early '90s. It even became briefly fashionable to own one, although the novelty quickly evaporated with the daily reality. Crash gearboxes and the ritual of adding oil to your petrol weren't exactly 'cool', and it wasn't long before disillusioned British owners were, literally, giving them away.
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