Tuesday, May 20, 2014
The Worst Car Ever
Many years ago, on a trip to Europe, I got the chance to take a spin in a Trabant, the East German car that has often been called the worst ever. It had an 18-horse two-stroke engine, handled like a child-built soapbox car, and belched smoke out of the tailpipe. I was fascinated!
The beauty of the Trabant was its simplicity-- it could be easily repaired and manufactured cheaply.
Every once in a while, my dad floats his idea for a "Forever Car," which would be very simple and built of easily replaceable components so it could last forever. I kind of like the idea, actually. The problem, of course, is that complex smog-control and safety systems required (properly) by American law make such simplicity very hard to achieve. Will the Trabant be the closest we get?
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Trabant most definitively wears with honors the “Forever Car” badge and toppling that will be a hard task. For one, it is made of Duroplast (a cotton fiber reinforced resin) and while the name may suggest some sense of security, riding in a Trabant leaves you with a renewed appreciation for the fragility and brevity of life. But the “attribute” which solidly marks the “forever” part is that of its spectacular greenhouse gas emissions, complete with sound and smoke effects (one of the many Trabant jokes deems it the longest car in history…8 feet of car and 50 feet of car exhaust). My favorite Trabant jokes though, have to do with its 18 horse two stroke engine limitations; like “why does a Trabant always linger long after the green light switched…’cause it got stuck on a chewing gum” or “what do you call one Trabant that reached the top of a hill...a miracle! Two Trabants at the top of a hill…science fiction!” and finally, a joke that only someone who lived in a place that relished in any anti-soviet jokes “One thousand Trabants at the top of a hill…the site of a downed Tupolev!”
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