If you’ve been in an original Mini or Beetle, you’ll know they share nothing with their modern namesakes.
Can’t say I’ve ever ridden in a Trabant, although they were everywhere when we visited the former DDR on a family holiday in the early ‘90s. News that a company is keen to revive this car initially left me scratching my head – after all, the minute the wall came down, ‘Easterners’ couldn’t wait to get their hands on ‘Western’ cars. Pity those poor souls who had just reached the top of the Trabant’s ten-year waiting list.
Should a Trabant rise from the grave, its appeal must surely be proximate. After all, despite the times millions of people will have some happy memories: their summer holiday in a Trabi; driving the pregnant wife to the hospital in the Trabi; weekends spent polishing the, erm, cardboard bodywork of the Trabi. And so on.
After all, who doesn’t look back at old pics and remember the life of a car fondly? Even if the car itself is perhaps best forgotten.
