The eternal Trabant.

Trabants are back in the news, at least in these three articles in the New York Times.

Where Have the Trabis Gone?

A People’s Car as Flawed as the People’s Paradise

A Red Menace That You Can Drive Yourself

HOW many workers did it take to build a Trabant? Two — one to fold and one to paste.

How do you double the value of a Trabant? Fill its gas tank.

How do you measure a Trabant’s acceleration? With a diary.

East Germany's infamous Trabant was a cuddly bundle of rough-hewn metal and socialist asbestos powered by the equivalent of a two-stroke lawn mower engine, for which creative types could fashion replacement parts from discarded tin foil and baling twine in the absence of auto care superstores.

Lest we forget, Reagan asked Mikhail Gorbachev to tear down the Berlin Wall, but it was opportunistic Ossies piloting their Trabants across the porous Hungarian border in the summer of 1989 that finally did the trick.

Check out this clip: 1960’s-era Trabant advertisement at YouTube.

Also: Everyday Life with the Trabant.