15 Facts About Trabant

Trabant is a series of small cars produced from 1957 until 1991 by former East German car manufacturer VEB Sachsenring Automobilwerke Zwickau.

The first Trabant model, the Trabant 500, was a modern car when it was introduced in 1957.

The Trabant gained a following among car tuning and rally racing enthusiasts.

German word Trabant, derived from the Middle High German drabant, means "satellite" or "companion".

Trabant had a steel unibody frame, with the roof, boot lid, bonnet, wings and doors made of duroplast, a hard plastic made from recycled cotton waste from the Soviet Union and phenol resins from the East German dye industry.

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Trabant's build quality was poor, reliability was terrible, and it was loud, slow, and poorly designed.

Trabant was the result of a planning process which had been intended to design a three-wheeled motorcycle.

In German, Trabant is an astronomical term for a moon of a celestial body.

The Trabant had a front, transversely mounted engine and front-wheel drive in an era when many European cars were using rear-mounted engines or front-mounted engines with rear-wheel drive.

Trabant's designers expected production to extend until 1967 at the latest, and East German designers and engineers created a series of more-sophisticated prototypes intended to replace the P601; several are displayed at the Dresden Transport Museum.

Trabant 1100 was a 601 with a better-performing 1.

Trabant could be bought for as little as a few Deutsche Marks during the early 1990s, and many were given away.

The Trabant was planned to return to production in Uzbekistan as the Olimp during the late 1990s, but only one model was produced.

Former Bulgarian Foreign Minister and Atlantic Club of Bulgaria founding president Solomon Passy owned a Trabant which was blessed by Pope John Paul II in 2002 and in which he took NATO Secretaries General Manfred Worner, George Robertson, and Jaap de Hoop Scheffer for rides.

Trabant entered the world of diplomacy in 2007 when Steven Fisher, deputy head of mission at the British Embassy in Budapest, used a 1.