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Recently returned from vacay in Budapest.  Still lots of Trabants on road there.  You can book tours via a Trabant or a Nic-Nic.  The tour is rather expensive considering there is NO AC or comfort.  The body is made of Duroplast - a bakelite/formica like material.  Apparently there was a big issue of what to do with crashed body parts as they don't decompose and aren't readily recyclable.  A scientist came up with a bacteria that would eat the plastic body in 20 days!  And you thought the rust worm was bad.  Latest recycle technique is to chop up and use for making cement blocks.

Many confuse the duroplast with corrugated cardboard. The engine is 2 cycle and smokes even at idle.

We took a tour in country and saw a lot of Stalin architecture.  Raw grey cement with a few small windows - no elevators or AC.  Joke was that during Communist rule there were no homeless folks.  Up to 8 families shared a single apartment!  Hence the incentive to turn others in to KGB/FSB!

Kiev architecture ukraine stock photo containing above and aerial ...

@Sacto Mitch - I had no idea such things existed, but now that I've seen (and heard) it, how can it be unseen (or unheard)? That is glorious, and that ridiculous 2-stroke makes absolute sense winding out through expansion chambers at full song.

I've got no idea if it's still the East German power-plant (it would make sense to drop in a RZ-500 or Gamma mill), but regardless - a 2 stroke mountain car mashes all of the "feels" for me. What a pleasant way to wake up this morning.

Put me in coach.

For as long as I can remember, I've loved cars and motorcycles. It's always been a hobby to watch classified ads and follow prices of various vehicles. As I've gotten older, I've come to appreciate the weird and rare, and watching their sales has been made much easier by means of the internet.

The East German Trabant has been pretty much universally acknowledged as being the undisputed worst cars in the history of automobiles, which is saying something given that the French built and still build cars.

All of that is why I found this auction kind of cool. It's a US titled Trabant - not particularly well maintained (it looks like it was painted with house paint and a whist broom). I thought it'd be kinda' cool for $2000 or some such.

The auction closed this afternoon, and the hammer dropped on it at $6800.

I need a new hobby.

@WOLFGANG posted:

What would a Yugo go for on BAT?

@WOLFGANG posted:

What would a Yugo go for on BAT?

Back around 1986 I was fixing and selling used cars part time aka  ...." Merklin's Low Mileage Lovelies"... off my friend's car repair shop lot. I bought a one-year-old pristine red Yugo from the back line of a Ford dealer for the hefty sum of $1,400 it had a bad cam as the lobes would round off at just past the 12,000 warranty.  The new cam was $57 shipped and took 3 weeks to get to a Dealer in NJ from Yugoslavia.  I drove the thing just once, it was nothing more than a square shaped tin box w/ no sound insulation, hard seats, steering was like Ralph Kramden's bus and the transmission that sounded like a straight gear 1928 LaSalle with no oil in it. After much laughing ....I managed to generated some sort of monetary profit when I sold it.

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