It's A Funny Old World: Trabant Edition

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I spent some time in Germany just after unification and remember all the East Germans piling into their Trabants to come and look at the glories of the West.

They were deadly bloody things, you'd be zipping down the autobahn at one thirty, one forty, and you'd come up rather quickly on these yokes trundling along at twenty.

The only saving grace and the only thing that on a lot of occasions saved gross katastroffes was the fact that they smoked like a Chinaman and gave you a bit of warning that this cardboard classic of the GDR was up ahead.

A Derbyshire man who has spent almost 20 years collecting East German Trabant cars has lost his final appeal against an order to remove them.

Graham Goodall,61,who lives in lives in Middleton-by-Youlgreave, has been involved in a dispute with the Peak District Park Authority since 2004. The authority issued planning notices to remove 40 of his 49 vehicles.

Two judges at London's High Court said Goodall was the "author of his own misfortune" and turned down the appeal.

Graham Goodall began collecting the Trabant - the two-stroke workhorse of former communist East Germany - after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Cheap to make but notoriously smoky and unreliable, they were one of the few cars available to Germans behind the Iron Curtain.more

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The Trabant was an East German car-like vehicle. In reality, it was more like a lunch box with the starter motor of a lawn mower as engine. It could accelerate from 0 to 100km/h on the same day and was the only vehicle known to man, that had the squashed insects on the rear window rather than the wind screen.

While most of the Known World never knew about the Trabant, it was very popular in East Germany. In fact it was so popular, that the waiting period for delivery was 15-17 years.

According to reports, the little blue puffs of blue smoke coming out of the exhaust pipe of the Trabant, were mistaken for smoke signals by some. This caused an international incident at one stage, when an American tourist of Sioux descent was highly offended by the apparent insults coming from a Trabant, which was stopping at a set of traffic lights. The situation could eventually be defused, after an interpreter, who was called to the scene, could clarify that the car was actually talking in a rare Apache dialect and was being friendly with the Tourist.more wiki.