This is as revolting a string of words as you're likely to see for quite some time: the Trabant is revving up for a comeback. As an electric car.
If that thought doesn't make a cold shudder run up your spine, then you don't know what a Trabant is. Simply put, the Trabant is the worst car ever made. It made the Yugo look like the pinnacle of automotive styling and engineering.
We've got a soft spot for obscure marques here at Autopia, and you know we love EVs. But if this Cold War relic from what was once East Germany returns, we're breaking out the stakes and garlic. We know just how bad this could be.
We know because we've driven Trabants. You can tell us about the aesthetics of a Pontiac Aztek or the chassis "robustness" of a Citroen 2CV or the reliability of a 1974 Triumph Spitfire, but nothing will prepare you for the incredible awfulness of a Trabant. They have no redeeming qualities. None. They're slow. They're aggressively ugly. They spew pollution like a tire fire. They're so unreliable they make British Leyland look like Toyota. And they're made out of something called Duroplast, a mixture of recycled cotton waste and phenol resin.
To experience a Trabant is to think you're the target of some hideous practical joke. But no. The Trabant was a real car -- the company that "built" them went belly-up in 1991 -- and it really was that bad. Yes, we know the cars have a loyal following of zealots who love them dearly. So did Charles Manson.
The idea of resurrecting the Trabant, even as an EV, even as something squeezed through the Chip Foose filter on PhotoShop, strikes us as being the worst automotive idea since the Ford Nucleon. But that's the news flying around the Internet today like a bad dream that just won't stop.
First reported in the German newspaper The Local, it seems that a modernized version of the "car," to be called the “Trabant nT” will make its debut at the Frankfurt auto show on Sept. 17. Herpa Miniaturmodelle, a toymaker that offers a model of the Trabant, came up with the idea and a "boutique carmaker" called IndiKar hopes to find investors. Good luck with that sales job, guys.
“It’s going to be simple, practical, and in the old tradition of the original,” the paper quoted spokesman Jürgen Schnell saying. “But it won’t be a retro model. It will have the newest technology and be purely electric.”
That's a good idea, because Trabants were about as clean as the floor of a New York taxicab. Trabants produce nine times the amount of hydrocarbons and five times the carbon monoxides of the average European car in 2007.
"The original Trabant was a small, stinky car," Herpa spokesman Daniel Stiegler told the BBC in an understatement that makes "Mistakes were made" look forthcoming. "Now we have an e-Trabant which is ecological and economical."
The e-Trabi could have a range of 100 miles, according to the Financial Times, and Schnell told the paper the car will "be simple, light and easy to maintain."
Lovely. But even if this new Trabant costs less than a Tata Nano, outperforms a Ferrari 458 Italia and runs as cleanly as MIT's solar race car, it will only begin to have atoned for the sins of the original.
Image: Herpa Minuaturmodelle
