In a comment on co-blogger Bryan Caplan’s post this morning, I mentioned the fact that in the 1980s, star East German figure skater Katarina Witt was given a Trabant as a reward for her productivity. Many East Germans were allowed to buy Trabants but, as with most consumer items, there was a lengthy queue.
Here’s a video about the Trabant. Watch it and you get some appreciation for what East Germans thought of as a reward for outstanding performance.
A couple of facts:
The top speed was under 6o mph.
It was a 2-stroke engine that achieved 26 hp.
Watch the video and you’ll learn a lot more about this Communist consumer item.
Personal story
In October 1999, I taught an economics course in the MBA program in Prague run by the Rochester Institute of Technology. Wandering around Prague during my off time, I saw a handful of Trabants on the road. In October 2000, I was back to teach again and I didn’t see a single Trabant on the road.
After Communism, Trabants were replaced largely by Skodas. The comparison between the two is stark.
UPDATE: Co-blogger Bryan Caplan sent me this 4-minute video on the Trabant assembly line’s quality control.
READER COMMENTS
Steven Brown
Feb 15 2021 at 7:32pm
Hi David. I presume you meant 26 horsepower, not 26mph, since you said one line above that it couldn’t reach 60mph.
Philo
Feb 15 2021 at 8:25pm
Or 26 mpg (miles per gallon).
David Henderson
Feb 15 2021 at 11:30pm
Oops. Thanks, Steven. Correction made.
Andrea Mays
Feb 15 2021 at 8:35pm
Ha! I remember seeing Trabis in East Germany in the 1970s and 1980s. By 1989/ reunification they were a hazard on the Autobahn: they moved too slowly to be safe on the western roads. They sounded a bit like a coffee grinder.
David Henderson
Feb 15 2021 at 11:30pm
Or a lawn mower.
Mauro Mello Jr
Feb 15 2021 at 9:38pm
It gets better (sort of).
Watch DDR [GRD] Trabant final [quality] inspection. (YouTube video, 4:16, from 2011. No known date when the actual assembly took place.)
It took buyers 10–13 years to receive one.
All hail the =cough= entrepreneurial state…
Don Boudreaux
Feb 15 2021 at 10:09pm
I visited Germany for the first time in September 1990, less than a year after the glorious crumbling of eastern European communism. I was a member of a contingent of young American professionals who spent a couple of weeks engaged with young German professionals. The entire trip was fascinating, not least because of its timing. Much of the Berlin Wall remained standing, although of course utterly ineffective. I remember literally walking gleefully through the desolate and deserted offices of East Germany’s Checkpoint Charlie guards.
A West German whom I met – for some reason I still remember his name: Axel Spanholz (or Spanholtz) – told me the following story about a Trabant – a story that I related nearly 19 years later in this letter to the Washington Times:
Jon Murphy
Feb 15 2021 at 10:10pm
This is only tangentially related, but your story here reminds me of a scene in the Simpsons in Season 2. Homer goes to buy a car from “Crazy Vaclav’s Place of Automobiles.” Homer is looking at a car and Vaclav, the salesman, says: “it will get three hundred hectares on a single tank of kerosene.” When Homer inquires “what country is this from?” Vaclav responds: “It no longer exists.”
David D. Boaz
Feb 16 2021 at 9:59am
Not to keep nagging — but by 1999/2000, did you mean 1989/1990?
David Henderson
Feb 16 2021 at 11:21am
Don’t worry about nagging. But no, I did mean 1999/2000. It takes a while for the stock of cars to be totally replaced.
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