Trabant: dissappearing reminder of a different world

The rock group U2 featured several Trabants in its 1992-93 Zoo TV concert tour. (Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Museum in Cleveland/The New York Times)

How many workers did it take to build a Trabant? Two - one to fold and one to paste.

How do you double the value of a Trabant? Fill its gas tank.

How do you measure a Trabant's acceleration? With a diary.

Trabant jokes can be as lame as the car's acceleration, but with 3,096,099 built, there must have been some people who took the car seriously enough to own one. Still, when the Berlin Wall came down, many Trabants were ditched by their owners faster than an Elizabeth Taylor husband and replaced with Western-built cars. But, since it's been estimated that 800,000 Trabis still survive, it's fair to ask: what happened to the other 2,296,099?

The commonly held view is that most of the cars were abandoned or destroyed. In the 1990s, some Trabant bodies were ground up and used instead of sand or salt for traction on winter roads.

"Trabants were often given away for free because to scrap the car cost more than it was worth," Matt Annen, who runs the Trabant USA website, wrote in an e-mail message. "One of the most famous stories is of people driving them as far to the West as possible before the car broke down, then leaving the signed title on the dash. In the East a lot of people still have their old Trabant sitting in their yard or in their garage." He said that he knew of 75 Trabants in the United States, but that there might be a lot more tucked in garages.

Some Trabants had movie roles. A blue model with an orange pop- up roof tent was featured in "Go Trabi Go," a 1991 German comedy about a family that endures a series of mishaps while driving from Leipzig to Italy. That same year, Billy Dee Williams, Dom DeLuise, and Milton Berle starred in "Driving Me Crazy," about an East German inventor who defects to America and tries to market a turnip-powered Trabant.

In the 1998 film "Black Cat, White Cat," pigs on a Yugoslavian farm are shown eating a Trabant. And in 2001, "Spy Game" had Brad Pitt's CIA character driving one from East to West Berlin.

The rock group U2 featured several Trabants in its 1992-93 Zoo TV concert tour, and those body shells now hang from the ceiling of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland.

Annen wrote that Germany still has more than 50,000 registered Trabants, but they are "much more common in other former Soviet countries like Hungary and the Czech Republic.

"They're still very cheap in Germany, selling on eBay for as little as 50 euros, although the German government's regulations on things like emissions and safety standards make it difficult to keep them on the road."

Indeed, during the next several years those 800,000 still-living Trabants may be doomed because European Union pollution regulations are expected to become even more stringent.

After all, it's been calculated that a Trabant emits 10 times as many hydrocarbons as a modern car. And that's no joke.