The Trabant is a car that was produced by former East German auto maker VEB Sachsenring Automobilwerke Zwickau in Zwickau, Sachsen.

The lifespan of an average Trabant was 28 years.

The engine for the Trabant 500, 600 and original 601 was a small two-stroke engine with two cylinders, giving the vehicle modest performance.

The Trabant was a steel monocoque design with roof, bootlid / trunklid, bonnet / hood, bumpers / fenders and doors in Duroplast, a hard plastic similar to bakelite made of recycled materials: cotton waste from the Soviet Union and phenol resins from the East German dye industry, making the Trabant the first car with a body made of recycled material.

The Trabant was the second car to use Duroplast, after the " pre-Trabant " P70 ( Zwickau ) model ( 1954 – 1959 ).

The Trabant was a relatively advanced car when it was launched in 1958 ; with front wheel drive, a unitary construction, composite bodywork and independent suspension all around.

The main letdown was the engine: by the late 1950s many small cars in western countries already used cleaner and more efficient four-stroke engines, as employed in the Renault, whereas budgetary constraints forced the use of a two-stroke engine in the Trabant.

When released the Trabant was technically equivalent to the West German Lloyd automobile, which had an air cooled two-cylinder four-stroke engine in the same size vehicle.

This car was the base of the Trabant series, and even the latest 1. 1s had a large number of interchangeable parts with this car.

It soon became apparent that there was no place for the Trabant in the reunified German economy.

The production line closed in 1991 and the factory in Mosel ( Zwickau ), where the Trabant 1. 1 had been made, was sold to Volkswagen.

This is likely due to the fact that the body of the Trabant was Duroplast, a material that, in East German production, often made use of varying quantities of different fibres, such as cotton, or occasionally paper.

In the early 1990s it was possible to buy a Trabant for as little as a few marks, and many were given away.

The popular culture surrounding the Trabant was referenced by the performance artist Liz Cohen in her Bodywork project, which transformed an East German 1987 Trabant into a 1973 Chevrolet El Camino.

Passy's Trabant was also blessed by Pope John Paul II in 2002.

In 1997, the Trabant was celebrated for passing the " Elchtest " (" moose test "), a swerve manoeuvre slalom, without toppling over like the Mercedes-Benz W168 ( 1997 A-class ) infamously did.

In 2007 the Trabant ( A P50 painted British Racing Green ) was brought into the world of diplomacy.

In August 2009 it was announced that a new Trabant powered by an electric motor will be unveiled at the 2009 Frankfurt Motor Show on 17 September with production starting if investment can be secured.

This distinction was cleared up by one of the leading contemporary German Humboldt scholars, Jürgen Trabant, in his works in both German and French.

In 1948, she was hired by Warren Trabant, first as Vienna Correspondent and later as the Austrian editor, for Heute, an illustrated magazine published by the Office of War Information in Munich.

His collected works appeared in thirty-four volumes at Vienna during the last years of his life ( Mélanges militaires, littéraires, sentimentaires ), and he bequeathed his manuscripts to the emperor's Trabant Guard, of which he was captain ( Œuvres posthumes, Dresden and Vienna, 1817 ).

As a result, the Trabant remained in production largely unchanged ; in contrast, the Czechoslovak Škoda automobiles were continually updated and exported successfully.

This ratio was a result of artificial restriction: COMECON rules did not allow Hungary to produce private cars domestically and Dacia / Lada / Škoda / Trabant car imports were never enough.

With its mediocre performance, outdated and inefficient two-stroke engine ( which returned poor fuel economy for the car's size and produced heavy exhaust ), and production shortages, the Trabant is often cited as an example of the disadvantages of centralized planning ; on the other hand, it is regarded with derisive affection as a symbol of the failed former East Germany and of the fall of communism ( in former West Germany, as many East Germans streamed into West Berlin and West Germany in their Trabants after the opening of the Berlin Wall in 1989 ).

The model, known as the Trabant 1. 1 also had minor improvements to the brake and signal lights, a revised grille and replaced the leaf spring-suspended chassis with one using MacPherson struts.

If East Germans had enough money to procure a television set, a telephone, or a Trabant automobile, they were placed on waiting lists which caused them to wait as much as a decade for the item in question.

Despite the humorous lyrics of the songs " Ljubav " (" Love "), featuring the sampled speech of Josip Broz Tito, " Wartburg limuzina " (" Wartburg Limousine "), " Blu Trabant " (" Blue Trabant ") and " Plitka poezija " (" Shallow Poetry ", named after the first Pekinška patka album, and a mixture of cover versions by Pekinška Patka ), the album had low sales.

Keith has been in many bands in the 1990s, including El-Ron, The Liver Sadness, Sheket / Trabant, The Finger Lakes and Gai / Jin.

The Trabant's designers expected production to extend to 1967 at the latest, and East German designers and engineers created a series of more sophisticated prototypes through the years that were intended to replace the Trabant P601 ; several of these can be seen at the Dresden Transport Museum.

In 2008, Time magazine rated the Trabant as one of the 50 worst cars ever made.

A Trabant 601 Limousine.

A Trabant 601 De Luxe Limousine.

Due to the long waiting period between ordering a Trabant and actually taking delivery ( in some cases years passed as scarce materials were obtained ), people who finally received one treated the car gently and were meticulous in maintaining and repairing it.

There were four principal variants of the Trabant, the P50, also known as the Trabant 500, produced 1957 – 1962 ; the Trabant 600, produced 1962 – 1964 ; the Trabant 601, produced 1963 – 1991 ; and the Trabant 1. 1 produced 1990 – 1991 with a VW engine ( making the " 1. 1 " a slight misnomer ).

Trabant two-stroke engine.

Production of the Trabant on April 30, 1991 reached 3. 7 million vehicles.

Trabant P50 built in 1959.

Russ visited two places without result and his blood pressure was down to zero.

The result was grace and modesty.

The enemy came looming around a bend in the trail and Matsuo took a hasty shot, then fled without knowing the result, ran until breath was a pain in his chest and his legs were rubbery.

I granted this might be so, but found the result to be even more attention to form than was the case previously.

The first result of Heidenstam's long sojourn abroad was a volume of poems, Pilgrimage And Wander-Years ( Vallfart och Vandringsar ), published in 1888.

The result was a collection of 280 songs, ballads, ditties, brought together from all regions of America, more than one hundred never before published: The American Songbag.

The result was the `` Gross Report '', prepared by Gross, as chairman, with the assistance of two U.N. Under Secretaries, Constantin Stavropoulos and Philippe De Seynes.

As a result, he was sent to a hospital in Arizona until his health improved enough for him to come back to Washington to work in the Government service.

The result was fortunate.

The result was that I found myself in the ridiculous position of having made a formal engagement by letter for the next week, only two days before my departure from London.

This was accordingly done, and the plight of the grateful Mrs. Morris was much relieved as a result of the generous loan, the amount of which is not known.

Almost inevitably, the first result of this technological revolution was a reaction against the methods and in many cases the conclusions of the Oxford school of Stubbs, Freeman and ( particularly ) Green regarding the nature of the Anglo-Saxon conquest of Britain.

They, however much they were in disagreement with the late Victorians over the method by which Britain was Germanized, agreed with them that the end result was the complete extinction of the previous Celtic population and civilization.

The result was that by secret agreement draft machinery was actually ready long before the country knew that the device was to take the place of the volunteering method which Theodore Roosevelt favored.

The result was that the rate of venereal disease in the American Army was the lowest in our military history.

It was a dinner party, Lewis had been drinking during the afternoon, and long before the party really got under way, he was quite drunk, with the result that the party broke up even before dinner was over.

the result was his inevitable bedazzlement through, ignorance.

As a result, your criticism of Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy and the Department of Justice was inaccurate, unwarranted and unfair.