"Ein Himmelblauer Trabant..."

A YouTube tribute to the Trabant 601, the iconic East German automobile, featuring a great, upbeat, hip-swinging vintage theme song (sung in German, no less, by a girl named Sonja Schmidt).

Also, check out this video of a couple of Trabis in a rally race, which ends with one of them crashing. And another...the guys on the sidelines have the thing up on its wheels and on its way again in about 15 seconds!

If you're curious what's the deal with this ugly little car: it was built from the late '50s or early '60s until about 1991 in Zwickau, East Germany and served roughly the same function that the earliest incarnation of the VW Beetle, that is a state-sponsored, cheap, standardized car for the lumpen-masses, but on a more cut-rate level of quality. I always thought it looked like a miniaturized, super-deformed caricature of a '55 Chevy; I love those clunky-cute little tail fins. After a wait of maybe two years, the Trabant customer would receive a little car made of Duroplast (plastic reinforced with wood pulp), powered by an air-cooled 2-cylinder, 2-stroke engine, and fueled by gasoline/oil mix...a car which was just like the one that each of his neighbors also waited two years for. Except the color might be sightly different--light blue, light green, or white. Possibly salmon. Or you might have ordered the wagon version instead of the standard sedan. The last couple of production years the Trabant received a VW Polo engine.

That may sound like a harsh assessment, and what business have I, a wicked Westerner, to criticize the beloved Trabi?

Actually, I think the Trabant is way cool. Not necessarily a good car, but cool. Lovable. You know.