The standard model had a brutal 33 hp. The hopped-up "Especial" variant had 42 hp!
Yeah, it was a sh.it car, even for its day (late 70s) rear engine, rear wheel drive, weight distribution was crap. He bought it cheap, and a friend drove it to college. He kept a burlap sack of potatoes in the front trunk for better handling.
I think the Trabant, which was damn-near ubiquitous in East Germany at the time, had 25 horsepower and seated a family of 4 with room to spare.
My neighbour is married to a German wife, her father and his sister fled to the West before the border closed jn the 60s.
He has seen in the months after the iron curtain fell and he drove there to visit family, (now there were no visa and background checks required anymore as during Soviet occupation) a Trabi with a break down, people pulled their stuff out and packed it in the police car and pushed the Trabi off the ramp, into a ravine to clear the road.
When there were no more 5 year waiting lists on buying a new car, or even buying a new fridge, people blew their savings on Western cars and appliances, right before they lost their jobs because nobody was buying the stuf they themself were making, either.
Nowadays, Trabis are worth money, as many people have "ostalgia" as the East German "ossies" say.
Trabant has tried a VW 4 stroke engine to survive in a free market, but people had enough of the model so they quit within 2 years. Vw bought that Zwickau factory dirt cheap, already with a functioning engine plant tooled up for their engine, in a nearby city, and nowadays builds bodywork for the Lambo Urus and a Bentley in that factory, though with 1/5th of the employment they had when they built Trabants for the East.
Mercedes took over the IFA truck plant in Ludwigsfelde, tried one model with Benz cab (the IFA cab was unchanged since the early 70s) but also quit building that product, and had it build components for their main works.
Fun thing is that IFA worked on a common rail injected diesel between 1971 and 1985,,and even extensively road tested it in the 80s: they wanted more power through precise fuel injection because there was no turbo manufacturer in the East, and they didnt have foreign currency to buy them in the West. Apparently the state could afford to have them put experimental common rail engines on the road, while Bosch and Magneti Marelli were still only dreaming of it...
www.ifa-museum-nordhausen.de
The guy who had the task of selling government property to the free market was shot dead. But there was an abundance of factories for sale, dirt cheap, they tried to give them a product but the real estate was worth more than the business, which caused huge job loss, and loss of industrial strength, which the economy in the East still feels. A bridge in Dresden collapsed last week, 17 minutes after the last tram passed. The city blames poor maintenance in the DDR era (construction in 1971 till the Wende in 1989 is 18 years) and not poor maintenance in the post DDR era, 1989-2024 is 35 years... They still cant keep up with the former BRD, and lack of maintenance is the result. The AFD, which opponents call a far right party, is very popular in the former East because of the discontent of the working class.
Now the German economy turns into recession because international companies are moving abroad because of green policies make it an uncompetive production country, the East again gets hit harder because jobs are cut first on the supply factories in the East, not in the main factories in the West.
