Few cars have existed which have gained quite such a popularly infamous reputation for being generally terrible than the humble Trabant. Having had plenty of history with a variety of Eastern Bloc cars over the years, it's on that I had always been curious to have a proper look at but had never had the opportunity present itself. That was until the closing days of 2023 when I found myself driving out to collect the car you see above, allowing me to finally get to see what they were all about. What little I had read on the matter over the years had led me to believe that far from being objectively terrible, that the poor little car was instead terribly misunderstood. I really wanted to see if that belief was correct.
Before we go any further though, we need a little bit of context. Especially for those of you who are probably asking what the heck even IS a Trabant? Even more likely if you're from areas distant from where these cars were originally available.
In a nutshell, the Trabant was the answer from former East Germany to the likes of the VW Beetle, Fiat 500, and Citroen 2CV. It was a car designed to provide simple, cheap motoring for the masses and to be easy to look after for owners even with little mechanical knowledge and only basic tools. Understanding exactly how it came to be and the reasons behind some of the design decisions requires a bit of a background history lesson first.
There wasn't really much left of the automotive industry in East Germany in the aftermath of World War II. What factory capacity hadn't been bombed into rubble had generally been scavenged of anything of use or value. A decision was made by the government to nationalise the automotive industry, bringing all of the companies together under one banner - IFA, standing for Industrieverband Fahrzeugbau which translates literally to "Industrial Association for Vehicle Construction." This was a pretty sensible step as it meant that all of the organisations involved could move forward as one to get manufacturing back up and running without worrying about competing with each other. While you might not recognise IFA by name, it's entirely likely that you'll recognise at least one of the brands which fell under their banner: EMV (Wartburg), MZ, Robur, IWL, Sachenring (Trabant), Barkas, Multicar and Simon - assuming I've not forgotten any. These covered the whole range of automotive manufacture, right from bicycles all the way up to heavy industrial trucks.
Initially as the industry slowly started to creak back into operation most production consisted of slightly updated versions of pre-war models as there simply wasn't the time or resource available to develop any new models. Despite this it was already widely known there was a significant demand there for a basic, cheap car that the masses could afford - Especially with how many vehicles had been lost during the war. This came to a head in 1953 when the government formally instructed IFA to develop a "people's car." The specification left the bulk of the detail in the hands of the designers but set out a number of core requirements which set the building blocks in place for what we would come to know as the Trabant.
This specification called for:
[] A Lightweight construction, with the total weight of the vehicle being no more than 600kg.
[] Engine output in the region of 14-20bhp.
[] Make use of the absolute bare minimum of steel.
[] Target price of 4000 East German Marks.
[] The vehicle to be "not a primitive solution" to transport, being "a fully valid means of transport with adequate driving qualities and comfort."
This last point requires a little expansion I think as we're viewing this with minds clouded with motoring standards as they are in 2024. The 1950s were the heyday across the whole of Europe of the microcar (or "bubble car" as they're often called) with models such as the BMW Isetta or Messerschmitt KR175 being particularly popular. While exceptionally cheap these tiny cars were hugely compromised designs in many ways. Similarly to how the German Beetle and French 2CV had been seen as huge steps up these vehicles, instead being "proper" cars, the intention was for the same to be true of IFA's new car. Let's not forget that this was 1953 - the Mini was still six years away from production when the brief for this project was presented to IFA.
This wasn't a trivial brief to fill. Especially bearing in mind that East Germany was by this point all but entirely isolated from the Western world, leaving them in a position where they had to design and make pretty much everything in house. It required a complete blank slate design, with VEB Sachenring being selected by IFA to take on the challenge.
A smart choice, as they had already developed a solution to the steel problem - Duroplast. This was a reinforced plastic material which they had successfully used to replace the unstressed steel and fabric panels on their F8 model cars since early 1953.
Duroplast is worthy of its own little introduction I think as there is a lot of misinformation out there about it and it's actually quite an interesting subject in its own right.
Fundamentally it is a fibre reinforced plastic - in principle similar to fibreglass, but in reality is really its own thing. The plastic component is phenolic resin. What we'd usually call Bakelite. This wasn't anything special by the 1950s having been around since 1907. What made it special here is how it was used, as normally it's about the last thing you'd want to use for a car body, being rather heavy and quite brittle. Fine granules of the plastic were infused with thin sheets of cotton fibres (leftover material from the fabric industry), being formed into a single solid panel of the required shape in a high temperature press - very similar to how a steel body panel would be stamped out. The resulting panels were relatively light weight, were very strong, and unlike fibreglass were far more suited to high speed production due to the stamping process.
One of the common myths around Duroplast is that it shares many characteristics with cardboard - or indeed that Trabants are made of cardboard! If a Duroplast panel is broken the way it tears does visually look somewhat similar to torn cardboard (especially as the panels often had a mid to dark brown base colour to them), but that really is as far as the resemblance goes. Despite what urban myth may have you believe, Duroplast is really quite a sturdy plastic and was very well suited to making the outer panels of a car body with.
The first vehicle to make use of an entirely Duroplast outer body was the rather stylish AWZ P70.
Original image from the Wikipedia page for the P70, photograph courtesy of Wikipedia user Burts.
However this was a vehicle primarily aimed at the export market and at nearly 10,000 Marks was a long way from the budget friendly car that IFA needed. It however was Genesis and gave the engineers some hands on experience to work towards their eventual goal. In late 1957 the designers in Zwickau gave us the first car to use the Trabant name, the P50 - debuting at the Leipzig Trade Fair that year.
Original image from the Wikipedia page for the P50, photograph courtesy of Wikipedia user Burts.
While it might not look it in the photograph above, this was actually a thoroughly modern car for the time - remember this was still a year plus change before the launch of the Mini.
The P50 (also known as the Trabant 500) utilised a steel base frame structure with an all Duroplast outer body, a transversely mounted air-cooled two stroke engine driving the front wheels through a four speed gearbox, independent suspension, seating for four, headlights, wipers, a heater, an optional radio...and not much else. While basic, it absolutely ticked all the boxes for everything that you needed from a car.
There were a number of technical improvements made during the four year production run - most notably with the gearbox gaining syncromesh on all forward gears and the engine's power output growing from the initial 17bhp to 25bhp by 1962.
The company learned a lot from the process of designing and building the P50, seeing what worked, what didn't and where refinements were needed. In 1962 this process culminated in the launch of the Trabant 601 - what the world in general would come to know as the Trabant.
The bodywork received a technically modest but visually substantial redesign from that of the P50 - with definite echoes of Austin Mini, A40 Farina and Peugeot 404 appearing in the styling. Under the skin the suspension was improved, the boot was enlarged and the interior significantly reworked.
The car was an immediate hit with the domestic market. Almost instantly the company found that their single biggest headache was trying to produce them fast enough, a problem they never really did fully address. Waiting lists ballooned to in excess of ten years by the late 80s. This situation not helped by the government insisting that cars be plucked off the production lines for export, especially to other Eastern Bloc countries to try to prop up their struggling economy.
This government - call it control or call it meddling as you see fit - was what ultimately doomed the Trabant. The designers and engineers at Zwickau knew full well that standing still was never an option especially in the world of car design. As such they had a raft of ideas to continually modernise the existing model, and indeed to introduce new ones as time went on to move with the times. However the government was never going to allow spending their precious (and rapidly dwindling) funds on new factory tooling or major R&D efforts when the existing car was selling so well and they couldn't keep up with the orders. As such the cars remained what would appear to the untrained eye, virtually unchanged for a full 27 years. Under the skin though there were continual incremental improvements though to virtually all areas of the car.
While their competition was very limited behind the Berlin Wall, offerings from other Eastern Bloc marques like Skoda, FSO and Polski Fiat were slowly but surely eating into the Trabant's market by the 80s, even though they were comparatively expensive alternatives. The real death knell came in November 1989 when the Berlin Wall fell. Suddenly the East German motorist found that they had choices benefiting from the 20+ years of design progress that the Trabant designers had been desperate to implement. Virtually the entire Trabant market evaporated into a European used car market shaped cloud almost overnight. Trabants immediately became all but worthless.
A last gasp came in 1990 with the culmination of a project which had been in process since before the fall of The Wall. Fitting a licence built version of VW's 1.1 and 1.3 litre engines into what was essentially a completely new Trabant. This still looked very like the 601 though, not really doing anything to distance itself from the outgoing model despite very few parts actually being carried over. However it was still years behind the times in most areas, and just couldn't compete with western market cars which by 1990 had moved on a long way in terms of fit, finish, comfort and refinement meaning that these cars found few buyers. Despite having put together a promising and thoroughly modern looking all new prototype city car in 1996 it never found any financial backers. The Trabant marque vanished into bankruptcy soon after.
While the Trabant name may have disappeared the parent company didn't. The Sachenring name still exists, as does the Zwickau factory - now producing vehicle components for third parties (including but not limited to the VW Audi Group) and offering design consultancy services. It's unlikely though that we'll be seeing another car with the Trabant name on though.
Aside from what it looked like and that it outwardly changed very little I've really not mentioned anything about the car in question in any detail though, and that's what we're really here to look at isn't it?
The first thing which will strike anyone used to the cars of 2024 when walking up to the P601 is how tiny it is. At 3.51 metres in length, it's just 46cm (1' 6.1") longer than the original Mini and is actually 4cm narrower and 10cm taller. The vast majority of that extra foot and a half of length is behind the rear wheels and the extra height is entirely in ground clearance. If you look at the car in profile it actually does look not entirely unlike a Mini with a larger boot and some vestigial tail fins grafted on the back.
While that boot does look like something of a stylistic afterthought when viewed side on it does definitely offer a hell of a lot more in the way of usable storage than the boot of a Mini. Given how small the footprint of the car is it's really a decent size. I had absolutely no problem whatsoever fitting a full size suitcase, good sized backpack, some tools and a couple of grocery bags in there for a trip a while ago and still had room to spare. At least half of that would have been on the back seat in a Mini or 2CV.
Opening the door and looking inside there again are definite echoes of the Mini & Beetle.
While it is undeniably compact the cabin feels light and airy with how much glass surrounds you, and similar to the Mini there's a large deep shelf that runs the full width of the car below the dashboard to offer storage, in addition to stretchy pockets in both front doors which you can actually fit way more in than it looks like you should be able to.
The dash in front of you is extremely basic. You have a single instrument pod right in front of you, a small bank of switches to your left, one stalk, one separate gauge in the dash to your right, and three push/pull knobs for the ventilation system and one more rotary control over to the right a little.
Starting from the left we have a small bank of switches and knobs.
From the left:
[] Manual pump for the windscreen washers - in the case of this car redundant as it has electric washers fitted.
[] Windscreen wiper/washer control. The wiper control settings are a little oddly sequenced by conventional logic - being off, slow, fast, intermittent with a short delay, intermittent with a long delay. The windscreen washers are activated by pushing the knob.
[] Headlight control.
[] Supplementary lighting switch/blank. This would have originally had a blanking plate here on my car, but that had long since vanished when I got the car and a hole in the dash would have driven me mad. This position was often filled with a green rocker switch for front fog lights/driving lights or a yellow one for rear fog lights. The front fog light switch here is actually from a later model which is why it looks different - I'm on the look out for one of the green rocker switches as that would be more correct.
[] Hazard flasher warning light. Yes I know it looks like a button, it really is a light.
[] Hazard flasher switch.
[] Heated rear window switch.
In the photograph above you can also just about see the choke knob peeking out underneath the dash just to the right of centre frame. You kind of have to know that's there as it's really not visible from the driver's seat.
Based on the style of the switch and being opaque plastic, I really wasn't expecting it but the rear window switch does actually have illumination built in and lights up when turned on.
The main instrument panel contains a speedometer and three (unlabelled) warning lights. That's it. There's a red ignition light on the left, green (though it's faded to yellow on my car) one in the middle for the indicators, and a blue one to the right for high beam. Thus concludes your tour of the main instrument panel!
Immediately to the right of the speedometer is a somewhat odd looking instrument as standard.
This is actually a gauge intended to give some vague indication of the rate of fuel usage. It has no real formal calibration other than "1 light = good economy, many lights = bad economy." The module on the fuel feed to the engine which measures the rate of fuel flow is known to be somewhat troublesome so a lot of cars have had it removed by now - mine being no exception. Rather than reinstate the original pickup I decided to follow the example of quite a few owners and retrofit a proper fuel gauge into this position in the dash.
Yes, you read that right. I had to retrofit a fuel gauge. As standard the Trabant never came with one, instead your gauge was a calibrated dipstick that you used to dip the tank to ascertain the level.
While I'm all for the "keep it simple stupid" approach to the design of this car, and it is by and large a brilliant bit of minimalist design, I personally do feel that this was maybe taking it a step too far. A proper fuel gauge on the dash would have been a definite quality of life improvement. The dipstick even then though would have a place, mainly in that it allows you to see precisely how much fuel can be put into the tank - allowing you to ensure that the correct amount of two stroke oil was added prior to filling up. Ideally this should be done first to ensure that the oil is properly mixed with the fuel. Personally though, I prefer having an actual gauge on the dash to keep tabs on the fuel level, especially with it not being a particularly huge tank.
Protruding from the right of the steering column is the gear shift.
Something which is notably absent inside the car is any diagram of where the gears are however...So if you're currently sitting in a Trabant and trying to figure that out, here's a map.
In the above diagram the right of the image is towards the front of the car. There is a pretty strong detent you have to push through to select reverse, so there's no real way to accidentally select that.
I've driven a few cars with column shift gear change setups and they've for the most part been okay once you've got used to them but rarely exactly the shining pinnacle of precision. This is one area where the Trabant kicks well above its weight. The layout of the gearbox allows for an extremely simple arrangement with a single rod acting directly on the shift fork with only one bush involved. Generally the number of rods, linkages and bushes involved is responsible for a lot of column shift gear changes being vague and sloppy. The setup on the Trabant however is really a joy to use. It's light enough to pretty much be operated by the tip of a finger and is brilliantly precise. Of course the big advantage of the arrangement is that it means that your hands never need to stray far from the wheel, coupled with the fact that it allows for a completely flat cabin floor. The gear shift is probably one of the biggest challenges from an engineering perspective if efforts had been made to produce a right hand drive version of this car - though as none of the primary export markets required it that wasn't something resources were ever set aside for. There are a handful of right hand drive cars in existence - but these are all conversions which have been completed by third parties rather than factory built RHD cars.
Moving to the right of the dash, there is a small panel below the dash and above the shelf with four controls on.
The three circular knobs allow control over the cabin heating/ventilation. The leftmost controls the admission of ambient temperature air into the cabin - this is purely ram-air pressurised by the forward motion of the car, there's no fan assistance. Despite that, when driving at any speed a decent amount of air does get supplied to the cabin. The next two control the provision of heated air to the footwell and windscreen demister vents. The heater in this car was a bit of a revelation to me in that it's proof that cars with an air cooled engine really do NOT need to have a rubbish heater. The air provided from the vents in the Trabant if all the ducts are properly in place is positively volcanic, and starts to heat up only within a couple of minutes of driving. The heating is provided by a two stage heat exchanger setup on the engine exhaust. The bulk of the heat comes from a large heat exchanger which surrounds the exhaust expansion chamber, but some additional heating is provided by a jacket around the exhaust manifold. There is a tiny little rubber hose which connects this jacket to the fan shroud, which is a bit of a faff to get back into position if the fan shroud is removed as it's crammed in right above the carburettor, as such it's often missing. I've highlighted this hose in the photo below.
If your heater seems to be poor it's well worth making sure that this hose is present and correctly fitted as it makes a dramatic difference to the amount of air provided to the cabin. Some aftermarket carburettor setups require an alternative arrangement here due to clearance issues, so if you've got a different carburettor fitted (Mikunis are a popular upgrade) the arrangement on your car may be slightly different.
There isn't really much else in terms of equipment to talk about in the cabin...The interior light mounted at the top of the left hand B pillar is about it!
It should be noted that this light is entirely manual - there are no door switches present. So you'll just have to turn it on/off yourself.
Space in the rear is rather cramped as you would probably expect for a car with such a small footprint. Despite not exactly being the most comfortable, it is entirely possible to actually fit two adults in the back seat if you need to - they might not be too happy being folded in there for a long trip though. Some of the later cars were offered with pop out opening rear windows, though they were obviously never specified on my car.
Having clambered into the driver's seat (which is a bit awkward if you've got long legs as the door aperture is pretty short), the driving position is quite strange. Because of the protrusion of the front wheel tub into the foot well the pedals are displaced a long way across to the right, with the accelerator actually to the right of the centre line of the car.
This results in a sort of side-saddle driving position with your feet shifted over to the right. The seat is also very low to the floor and has limited rearward travel, meaning your knees are up around your elbows a bit to start with. It's not actively uncomfortable at least not on local journeys (I'm not sure I'd be saying the thing after sitting there for three or fours hours at a time), but it is quite peculiar. The seats aren't anything to write home about but are reasonably well padded and perfectly comfortable for a compact car like this which is really designed as a local runaround rather than a trans-continental tourer. Personally I find the driving position to be far less uncomfortable than that of a classic Mini in which I find my right shoulder pretty firmly jammed up against the door and knees firmly wedged against the steering wheel. These really are criticisms that are simply due to it being a tiny car though rather than necessarily being specific shortcomings of the Trabant.
The moment you start the engine though, the biggest difference between this car and most of those you would compare it to becomes very apparent - and that's what is under the bonnet.
The two stroke nature of the engine becomes instantly apparent as it rattles and chatters into life with a soundtrack that you would more expect from a snowmobile than an otherwise fairly conventional looking car. While there were a lot of reasons why the two stroke engine made a lot of sense when the model was launched, one of the very obvious disadvantages though is that it is incredibly noisy when compared to an equivalently specified four stroke unit. Being air cooled also adds to the racket, both because there's no water jacket around the engine to dampen the mechanical noise and because there's also a powerful crankshaft driven fan running to force air over the cylinder barrels and heads.
When this car was being designed, a two stroke engine made a lot of sense; namely because you can make one with orders of magnitudes less moving parts than a four stroke unit. You can eliminate the need for any valve gear, a camshaft, oil pump & associated forced lubrication system, oil cooler, and by choosing an air cooled design you also do away with the radiator, thermostat and water pump. The use of a gravity fed fuel system like on a motorbike also dispensed with the need for a fuel pump. The ignition system has also been heavily simplified, using a pair of sets of points and a separate ignition coil to fire each spark plug rather than using a conventional distributor - again a couple of components eliminated from the bill of materials and kerb weight.
The fact that every stroke is a power stroke means that a two stroke engine tended to be more powerful than a four stroke engine of the same displacement, and the mechanical simplicity resulted in a very light weight engine so their power to weight figure was vastly superior. While you wouldn't exactly want to lift the combined engine/gearbox out of a Trabant by hand, they are light enough that it's a task that can be managed without needing any particularly specialised lifting gear, and once on the bench the engine and gearbox are pretty easy to move around by hand, especially once separated. That combination of being simple, cheap to make, simple to maintain and having a great power to weight ratio made it a really simple decision to make. Especially as in the 50s and 60s the East Germans were very much at the cutting edge when it came to two stroke engine technology. Let's not forget that MZ were also part of the IFA group of companies, and their two stroke bike engines were and still are very well respected.
Two stroke engines though are not without their drawbacks. For one as we've already mentioned, refinement really isn't their strong suit. Fuel efficiency is also notably poorer than a four stroke engine of the same specification. Generally they aren't as long lived, requiring rebuilds more frequently than a four stroke engine - this being back in an era when it was entirely expected in most cases that an engine would need to be totally dismantled and overhauled at least once or twice during the life of the car, and when the majority of cars were pretty much worn out by the time you had 100K miles on the clock. The flipside of this was that they were far simpler and cheaper TO rebuild when needed. Unfortunately that's not so much the case these days as the decline in popularity of two stroke technology in general has resulted in far fewer machine shops being equipped to deal with tasks like putting together the pressed together crankshaft assembly.
Of course a large drawback of the simplicity provided through pre-mixing the engine's lubricating oil and the fuel is that said oil is burned along with the fuel. This obviously has a negative impact on the emission levels. It also means that the engine's lubrication is dependent on the fuel supply. This can cause problems in situations like on long downhill stretches or when cruising at a steady speed on light throttle as they're situations where the engine is likely to be spinning at high speed, but relatively little fuel is going to be fed into the engine. To this end, to avoid excessive engine wear and potential seizure the use of engine braking should be minimised, and if you're travelling at a steady speed on the open road, it's good practice to let the engine drop to idle periodically, giving it a blip of full throttle to feed a good gulp of oil into the engine to keep things well lubricated.
Trabant have helped you out here in that there's a freewheel mechanism on fourth gear, so as soon as you lift off the throttle the engine will be decoupled from drive and will drop back to idle. It's a pretty simple setup, but really does help a lot in looking after the engine. You're not really losing much in terms of engine braking as a two stroke like this really doesn't provide much anyway. You just need to be aware that it's not available - especially on a car with drum brakes where brake fade could be a real possibility on long downhill gradients if you didn't plan accordingly. There is also no servo assistance on the brakes in the Trabant - but it's such a light car that it really isn't necessary, and if in good order the brakes on a Trabant should be more than sharp enough, the pedal just needs a far firmer shove than you'd expect compared to a modern car.
Back when the Trabant was launched while the number of makers of two stroke car engines was dwindling as four stroke engine technology was refined. A few companies were still using two stroke engines in cars - Saab and Suzuki being the two you're most likely to have heard of - along with a multitude of makers using them on bikes of course.
A popular myth that has been circulating since the dawn of time is that the engine used in the Trabant is a slightly re-worked pre-war DKW design. This is false. They are both port induction two cylinder air cooled two stroke petrol engines with roughly similar displacement, but that's about all they share. If you look at the two engines together there are a host of major design differences - the whole crankcase design is completely different (Trabant has intake and exhaust both on the front of the engine, DKW has intake on the front, exhaust on the rear), and the DKW engine doesn't feature any provision for the Trabant's rotary intake valves. While it looks old fashioned to us today, the Trabant's engine at the time of its launch was very much up to date in terms of the design and technology used. The rotary valve arrangement in particular was something that was more commonly seen on high performance two stroke motorbike engines in the 60s and 70s.
Of course time doesn't stand still - and pretty much all mainstream Western manufacturers had switched away from noisy and smoky two stroke power units for cars by the 70s.
Note that I'm talking about petrol two stroke engines here - two stroke diesel engines such as those made by Detroit Diesel or Napier's Deltic are completely different beasts entirely and are worthy of entirely their own discussion, but they did live on for quite a lot longer as they had their own sets of advantages and design differences which negated a lot of the drawbacks to the engines we're talking about here. They also generally were not used in passenger cars. Generally...Though I do know of at least one GMC Suburban which has had a Detroit 4-71 crammed into it - very much not factory fit though!
Once you got into the 70s the two stroke engine in the Trabant really was looking like an extremely noisy anachronism - especially in the eyes of the Western world. By the 80s almost hilariously so, but the car had to soldier on with it all the way up until 1990 when the P601 finally ceased production as the government simply refused to provide R&D funding to upgrade the car. VEB Sachenring who built it had visions of four stroke, diesel and even rotary engined versions, but aside from one new model which came to light in 1991 using a VW engine they were never to be. By then of course the whole design of the car was massively outdated before it even left the factory due to how quickly the automotive world had evolved on this side of The Wall.
How much of a headache actually is it though? Was the car any more worthy of being laughed at than the Mini, so beloved of many classic car fans? I'm admittedly looking at this from the perspective of a classic car fan rather than an overly critical reviewer working for a mainstream car magazine in the 90s who wants a cheap laugh at the Trabant's expense. These views are mine and as such obviously are somewhat subjective, so take it or leave it as you see fit.
A two cylinder in line engine like this you would tend to expect to try to shake the car apart, but in spite of the raucous noises emanating from under the bonnet and tailpipe there is actually relatively little vibration transmitted into the body. Certainly no worse than you'd have expected from any other budget car with its design roots in the 60s, and certainly no worse than any 80s family hatchback with a diesel engine.
The clutch pedal is so light as to feel like it's not actually attached to anything, and the car can be slotted into gear virtually with one finger with how light the gear change is. While you do need to use a decent amount of revs to get going cleanly, the car gets moving well enough, and around town feels far more peppy than I had expected. Yes, it only has 26bhp and no bottom end torque to speak of, but the car only weighs 600kg so you don't need masses of power and torque. It's also quite low geared so most of the usable performance is concentrated between a standing start and around 40mph. Anywhere north of that you do start to wish both for a bit more grunt as the brick wall aerodynamics take their toll, and the engine rpm has you reaching for a set of earplugs. The "official" top speed of the P601 is 100kph, or 62mph. This figure dates back right to the launch of the model though and the spec sheets were never really updated - as such most later cars like mine will absolutely do more than that, though the degree to which the engine is screaming at you probably means that you really don't WANT to. Realistically a comfortable cruising speed is around 50mph.
There are some adaptations that you need to keep in mind when driving a car with a two stroke engine like this though. Firstly is that they absolutely do not tolerate being "lugged" at low revs under heavy loads, this will lead to overheating of the piston. Instead if you're accelerating hard or climbing a gradient you should drop a gear or two and keep the revs up. The other thing to keep in mind is that the engine's lubrication is provided by the fuel/air mixture being fed into it. So with the throttle closed that supply is greatly reduced, as such you should really avoid running the engine at speed on a closed throttle where possible - so no using engine braking when descending hills. This is no real loss as this engine provides very little of it anyway - and fourth gear is equipped with a freewheel device so that if you take your foot off the throttle when in fourth gear the engine can return to idle and the car can roll freely.
A lot of people seem to think that if you use the tiniest bit of engine braking that the engine will immediately seize, but that really isn't the case. For a start there is always still some fuel and oil making it into the engine, the volume is just reduced. The engine is also doing far less work so the requirement for cooling (the fuel/air mixture entering the combustion chamber does actually cool the piston crown) is reduced. It really isn't good for the engine though so where practical it should be avoided. I was also taught that if you were letting the engine drop to idle for a period that it was always good practice to give a blip of throttle first to give a decent gulp of fuel/oil into the engine. This isn't really a difficult thing to deal with in the real world, it's just something that you need to be aware of if you haven't driven/ridden a two stroke engined vehicle before.
An image that pretty much everyone has seen and is forever associated with the Trabant (and to some extent two stroke cars in general) is the one of a bunch of Trabants and Wartburgs crossing into the West immediately following the fall of the Wall - in a giant cloud of blue smoke. This has given rise to the popular misconception that these cars always trail a huge cloud of smoke behind them wherever they go. This quite simply isn't true. A Trabant running properly mixed fuel/oil and in good order will not smoke visibly under normal driving. You will get a bit when starting up from cold and for a few minutes, and a bit if the car has been idling for any real period of time as any accumulated oil is cleared from the crank case. However other than in those situations there shouldn't be visible evidence of this being a two stroke car - you can *smell* the two stroke oil from the exhaust, but you really shouldn't be able to see an obvious vapour trail in your rear view mirror.
If on the other hand you're running a very rich oil mixture, the engine has been idling for a long period (for instance, when sitting in the queue at a very busy border crossing), or the engine is worn and down on compression yes, then you may well end up with a proper smoke screen from the exhaust that James Bond would be proud of.
Another part of the Trabant which isn't particularly sophisticated is the suspension. This uses a transverse leaf spring arrangement at both ends (with the spring itself forming the upper control arm at the front). This setup is simple, cheap and robust. However it's not really tuned for comfort, and when combined with the low weight of the car does mean that the ride is rather on the bouncy side to put it mildly.
You know what though? I was pleasantly surprised by how the car drove. Yes, the power on tap is limited, but the delivery always feels eager. Around town the low gearing, light clutch and gear change that's a joy to use, excellent all round visibility combined with steering that's lighter than on several cars I've had with power steering make it very easy and quite fun to drive. While the ride is very bouncy, it never seems as harsh as on quite a few other cars I've driven, and the fact that there is some actual springing in the seat helps. I also reckon that the springs on my car have probably never been apart to be cleaned and greased either - and that's something which should be part of semi-regular maintenance so that may well improve things. Likewise the shock absorbers look to be original, and I imagine after 40 years and 135K kilometres they're probably not at their best.
This is not a car you want to take on the motorway or dual carriageway really unless you need to. That's just not what it was designed for. It will absolutely deal with it and get you to where you need to go, without even a huge amount of stress if you just tuck in behind a HGV that's cruising on their 56mph limiter, but it's clear that you're pushing it out of its comfort zone. Around town though it's really in its element, and likewise on a quieter country B road where you can set your own pace and buzz along it's far more pleasant. Yes, that engine is incredibly noisy, but that's really the only thing which leaps out at you. The car tracks straight and true, the steering while very light has great road feel, and while requiring a decent shove as they're unassisted, the brakes are more than adequate (note, that my car does have the disc setup from the later Trabant 1.1 fitted - though from what I hear from other owners the brakes are absolutely fine in the stock configuration so long as they're properly in adjustment - which many especially in period simply weren't).
Something that's very noticeable at least in my car is that basic it may be, the cabin is astonishingly free of squeaks and rattles. The only one that is really obvious in my car comes from the ashtray in the dash, and that's because someone has broken one of the clips that hold it in place. My daily driver is from 2007, and THAT has more things in the cabin that rattle. Also kind of hard to quantify, but the car just feels solid. There's no perceptible flex or shake in the frame when you hit pot holes, speed bumps or anything like that. I was quite prepared given the largely plastic construction for it to be quite floppy, but the frame feels really taught on the road and I'd honestly not have a clue from the driver's seat that it wasn't a conventional steel bodied car at all.
Handling wise it seems entirely acceptable, and really does just go where you point it as you'd expect a small and light car to do so. The somewhat bouncy suspension does occasionally mean it gets bumped off line when cornering, but at the sorts of speed you're going to be driving this and with how light the car is in mind it's never alarming. The steering really does have great feel transmitted back through the wheel as well, so you know what's going on under the front wheels. Speaking of the steering - the turning circle is almost absurdly small, which is another real bonus when driving around town. I imagine the very short wheelbase and narrow track would make it a little squirrelly if you were pushing the limits - but with 26bhp on tap and with the type of driving this car was designed for that's really not likely to be a huge issue.
No, it's nothing like a modern car. It's a tiny, utilitarian car from the 60s. If you were getting into it and doing a qualitative comparison to a Mark I or II Ford Fiesta, or even an Austin Metro it's not going to come out looking great - You're comparing it to cars that are 20 years newer which launched during probably the fastest period of progress the small car sector ever saw. A much more accurate comparison though would be to a Morris Minor, the original Fiat 500 or 126, Citroen 2CV, a VW Beetle or an early base model Mini. Against those cars it honestly holds its own a lot better I feel than the popular press would have you believe. Especially if you look at the comparative prices. It's kind of difficult to find accurate data on exchange rates for the East German Mark, but it looks like a Trabant P601 in the mid 80s would have had a list price very roughly half that of a basic Mini. Is it half the car? I absolutely don't think so.
It's only when you start digging into it in a bit more detail that it starts to become apparent that for all the simplicity on the surface that the Trabant isn't as hastily thrown together design as you might expect. The fact that the body isn't floppy, creaky and rattly suggests that there's something slightly more clever going on under there. Sure enough, once I found a photo of a Trabant sans all the Duroplast panels I saw something which looked strangely familiar. The car is built around a pressed steel base frame, the design of which will be very familiar to anyone who's looked in detail into the design of the Rover P6 - which without its non-structural outer panels fitted looks like this.
The Trabant looks like this.
Both of these images appear to be from period documentation, and I've struggled to find an actual original source - if anyone knows where they originate from, please feel free to let me know so I can provide the appropriate credit/source data.
You honestly could be forgiven looking at these two and thinking that they were two designs from the same manufacturer just at opposite ends of the model tree. It still breaks my brain a bit that two such utterly different cars ended up using such a similar - and unusual - method of construction, launched in completely different markets, within a year of each other.
That base frame and Duroplast construction is a lot more sturdy than urban myth would have you believe. At some point in the late 80s the Trabant 601 was subjected to crash testing as part of the partnership that was being set up between them and VW, and much to the surprise of the VW engineers involved, it actually performed far better than expected - more than holding its own against the then current Polo. So much for being made of cardboard.
It's also quite evident looking at my car that these weren't made of paper. This car clearly hasn't lived a charmed existence at any point in its life, yet aside from one small crack in the bonnet and a chunk that's been taken out of the nearside front wing, despite innumerable scrapes and scratches which would normally have dents and creases accompanying them, the Duroplast body panels have shrugged off the last forty years astonishingly unscathed. The biggest weakness in terms of longevity for the Trabant is actually the steel frame. The enemy is rust just as with any car. I wouldn't say that it rusts more or less than any mass market car that was designed in the 60s or 70s really, though the fact that quite a bit of corrosion can take place hidden away behind the plastic panels without being visible can be a bit of a trap for the unwary (just like on the Rover P6!). In the case of my car the biggest headache rust wise has actually been down to water ingress that was never tackled by previous owners leading to a few bits of the floors being eaten away from the inside out.
When I picked the car up this is what the interior looked like.
Bit of a sorry sight, and I had to admit that there was a certain element in the back of my mind asking "What exactly have you got yourself into this time?" Having spent two hours on the way home staring at this bit of quality electrical workmanship on the dash probably didn't help improve my confidence. Nor did little things like discovering that the windscreen wipers didn't really work halfway through the drive home, on the M25 in heavy traffic.
The half inch or so of standing water in the rear footwells didn't exactly inspire confidence either. Draining that did initially prove slightly complicated simply because it was the middle of December and the water was actually largely a chunk of ice rather than a puddle. However once the weather stayed above freezing for long enough to defrost it I was able to pull the carpets and underlay out. Thanks to sensible design this takes only a couple of minutes and requires no tools.
You can clearly see that there's been standing water in there for a long, long time from the staining on the carpets and underlay.
The most time consuming job I had in the first month or so of ownership was simply trying to figure out where the water was getting into the cabin from and trying to put a stop to it. In the meantime I left the carpets out and drilled a couple of small holes in the floorpan to ensure that any water that did get in could get out again. The worst leak by a country mile was from failed seam sealer somewhere in the general vicinity of the fuel tank. I never actually found exactly where this was coming from, however thoroughly going over everything in that general area with modern underbody sealant pretty much immediately stopped the leak in that area dead. Another major contributor was the fact that all of the door seals had long since turned to solid plastic rather than rubber. I had a feeling that attempting to revive these was likely doomed to fail and really wasn't worthwhile given that a whole new set of seals for both doors, all windows and the boot lid were available as a set from Trabantwelt for a sensible cost, so they were just swapped out. The passenger's door was also letting a lot of water in as the window rail had come adrift so water running down the glass wasn't being directed away from the door card correctly.
Once it was dried out, given a good clean and the extraneous wiring that had previously been dangling all over the place was evicted, it looked rather tidier. You really could be forgiven for thinking this was a different car. I really was surprised how well the interior in general cleaned up.
The seats and the shelf under the dash still need to be tackled, but we'll get to those in due course. As it stands it does look a thousand times better I think.
The one area where I do still have some water getting in is the boot. Which was precisely as disgusting as the rest of the interior prior to being cleaned.
This also cleaned up pretty well all things considered.
Though the carpets have been removed again for the winter since this photo was taken as the boot does still have some water getting in due to corrosion around the bottom of the rear window aperture. This needs attention from a bodywork specialist to sort, so I'll be leaving that in their capable hands rather than attempting to sort it myself. Likewise I'll be getting them to sort a bit of rust I found in the offside sill. Nothing too catastrophic, and really nothing too surprising on a 40 year old budget car which as far as I can see has never had any welding done to it yet.
The single biggest job I've had to do on the car since I collected it was replacement of a rear wheel bearing - which initially sounded like a right old debacle as I discovered that you pretty much have to remove the whole suspension arm as the stub axle has to be withdrawn from the inboard side of the hub (and the shock absorber mount needs to be removed to make room). However when I actually got stuck into the job I discovered that this whole process actually took maybe an hour, and really was just easier than trying to wrestle with everything in situ. Also gave me a good opportunity to properly inspect the trailing arm itself and apply some rust protection (they can rot out around where the locating bushes sit). The single most annoying step was just having to bleed the brakes when everything was back together - but that's just because it's a bit tedious, especially if you don't have a helper.
Generally I had just been enjoying using the car through the spring though. A huge chunk of my driving is relatively local and travelling on my own. The sort of journeys for which the Trabant is a great match for, and while I hadn't expected so when I bought it I quickly found that it had become my go-to for most of my day to day motoring. It just made me smile every time I drove it, and being tiny made it easy to park even in crowded car parks or on street. I despise parallel parking on-street, but with how tight the steering lock on the Trabant is even that's simple.
However we did then hit a bit of a hurdle in May when I was on my way to ConFuzzled. Meaning that for the first time since 2009 I was left with no alternative other than to call on breakdown recovery as I had a problem that clearly wasn't going to be anything I was able to sort at the side of the road.
The trip was going fine, right up until the point at which it wasn't. I was cruising at around 50mph when there was a singular "cough" followed about 1/2 a second later by all hell breaking loose and it sounding like someone had thrown a handful of marbles into the cooling fan. I immediately shut the engine off and coasted into the layby at the entrance to a couple of driveways. Which I was most grateful for given I was on a 70mph dual carriageway at the time and this was the only place to pull over for quite a ways in either direction. Upon doing a little investigation myself I found that I could no longer rotate the engine by hand - it stopping with a solid "clonk" at one point in either direction. Time for a tow home.
Credit to AutoAid for the co-ordination and Dunchurch Autos for being there in well less than an hour and providing an efficient and professional recovery. Even if that breakdown truck was sorely lacking in the suspension department! We were soon bouncing our way back to Milton Keynes. What then followed was me being abruptly reminded why I try to avoid public transport if I have any alternative, given that it then took me nearly ten hours to the minute to make it between Milton Keynes Central and BIrmingham International train stations...Between delays, poorly worded announcements, unclear signing on the trains themselves and plain old fashioned bad luck, basically if it could have gone wrong it did. Suffice to say after the convention I got a lift home with family! I used to work in public transport, so I'd like to think that I've probably got a better chance at managing to make it work than your average man on the street, but no...it's just a mess.
I did eventually get there, albeit sadly without a car to show on the Saturday, which felt a bit odd if I'm honest!
Once I was back home a bit of investigation revealed that a bit of metal had found its way into cylinder number 1. Somehow not managing to completely obliterate the bore while bouncing around in there.
With these bits of metal evicted the engine span freely again, and indeed ran seemingly just as before. So entirely likely I actually could have "fixed" this at the side of the road an limped on the last ten or so miles to my destination. However I don't think it's likely to have stayed fixed for very long if I had. That metal has to have come from somewhere and it most likely used to be one of the internal bits of the engine. It having found its way into the cylinder is the symptom of a failure rather than the cause itself, even if that was what actually caused all the noise and stopped me. The big question I really had was whether it was something new, or whether it was a free gift left behind by whoever last had the engine apart - someone who based on the plethora of mismatched hardware, silicone sealant everywhere and loose bolts I'd found so far didn't have the most exacting standards - It's not by any means impossible that this could have been floating around in the crankcase for months or even years and had just got picked up. I really wanted to know...Suffice to say things escalated.
Pretty quickly we found additional issues. Firstly was before I'd even actually gone any further than removing the exhaust manifold (and discovering that I had a completely incorrect gasket on one exhaust port and half a missing one on the other, so I'm sure that was helping noise levels a bunch). In addition to some marks suggesting that additional metal had indeed found its way into cylinder number 2 in small amounts there was some really nasty looking scoring on the piston skirt.
This turned out to only be the tip of the iceberg and this piston was really rather ugly when it was removed - this has clearly got rather hot at some point in the past.
What however seems odd about this is that there was no corresponding scoring in the cylinder. There were a couple of small scratches, but nothing that lined up with these seizure marks. Suggesting to me that at some point somebody has chucked a set of cylinders on this engine and reused the old pistons. I can't actually remember which piston this cylinder belonged to now (this all happened a couple of months ago), but the other thing which I couldn't help but notice was the rust pitting around BDC - that suggesting to me that this engine has had moisture sitting in it for some considerable time sometime in the past. That's the sort of damage I'm used to seeing on cars which have been left with water sitting in following head gasket failure - but without a wet cooling system involved that's obviously not the case here.
Still scratching my head a little given the lack of a real smoking gun and apparent mishmash of reused parts, I kept poking around. Then noticed something suspicious poking out of the oily gunk around the base of cylinder number 1.
This clearly didn't belong there.
Unlike the previous shrapnel that I'd fished out of cylinder number 1, this was clearly hardened steel. Very hardened steel, I couldn't bend it even with a pair of vice grips. This to me seemed like something which had detached itself from a rotating component in the engine rather than just being something left behind and hinted at there being deeper damage.
Sadly it didn't take more than another minute or so to spot damage to the actual crankcase itself. The faces adjacent to the inlet ports are absolutely scored to hell.
This is actually worse than the camera makes it look - think brake disc that's been run for several hundred miles with the pads down to the metal. It's both deeply scored and rippled with a fair amount of material having been removed. I've no real way to know whether this is recent damage, historic damage or has been steadily progressing over time. It's pretty clear evidence though that there has been abrasive contamination in the engine - and if both of the inlet valve faces look like this, there's a pretty good chance that the crankshaft bearings aren't going to look great - Oh, and those bits of metal have to have come from somewhere.
While there's no terrible amount of play in the bottom end bearings, there is a distinct tight spot roughly every third revolution of the crankshaft (which corresponds with a noise that's always been there since I got the car), so something isn't right. I also have no particular reason to believe that this isn't the original engine to the car - and at what we're pretty sure is 135K Km on the clock we'd be expecting it to need some TLC by now. As there's clearly been abrasive gunk floating around in the engine, something feels "not right" when it's rotated, both of the pistons are damaged, both of the jugs have a fair amount of wear on them and one of the heads has been pretty well beat up...We're not really left with much of the core unit that's worth re-using. Potentially the bottom half of the crankcase...Maybe? The cylinders themselves might actually clean up to be serviceable with a good hone, but in the grand scheme of things they're not actually that expensive and given that there's a fair bit of deep pitting on one it's just not worth it.
I think the way we'll be going with this will simply be to buy an "off the shelf" engine from Trabantwelt as efforts to track down a running engine in the UK (or indeed a second engine at all) have so far failed. I'll also pick up a full compliment of engine and gearbox mounts as I may as well swap those while I'm in there - likewise the clutch and release bearing. This car has always suffered from pretty major clutch judder in my ownership, so it would be nice to eliminate all of the most likely candidates for causing that while I'm in there.
Once the new engine is here I will do some further teardown on the original unit to see if I can figure out exactly what has come apart and where that metal has come from, but I don't think I'm likely to really find a single catastrophic failure here. It's just worn out, and I reckon we're likely to find that the metal is going to originate from one of the shims or washers that sit between the various spinning/stationary bits of the crankshaft. The simple fact is that this engine has always seemed distinctly on the rattly side compared to most I've heard video of, and given the mileage I think it was just running on borrowed time from the day I bought it a couple of thousand miles before this eventual failure. I am curious to see what I find when I do pull the bottom half apart though. I don't really see this as a failure of the design or of the car itself, it's something that has just worn out - that happens and it's a fact of life.
Does it make the slightest bit of sense to spend probably somewhere in the region of €2000 on a rebuilt engine and the associated bits and pieces for this car? Absolutely not. It's probably worth about that on a good day. It would make far more sense for me to part the car out and buy another that's in overall cleaner condition. However if everyone does that, eventually there won't be any of these cars left. There's also no real guarantee that if I pick another car up that it won't go bang in some expensive way 1500 miles down the road. This car seems by and large to be pretty solid even if it is scruffy, the gearbox seems healthy, it's had the front disk brake upgrade fitted, likewise the camber correction kit at the rear, plus the suspension in general feels pretty tight. So quite a bit of work has been done to this car over the last few years, and critically everything is there. The interior is actually pretty tidy as well and that can be surprisingly expensive to sort out despite the simplicity. Whether it makes logical sense or not, I'd rather see this car live on rather than just park it and transfer the shiny(ish) bits to another one. So towards the end of 2024 I'll hopefully get a fresh reconditioned engine on the way and we'll get this little rattle box back on the road.
So while this car is currently parked up (and turning rapidly green because of the proximity of a tree), she will be back up and running in the new year.
This page was created on 12th December 2024 and updated on the same date.
