Plastics Blog

The Trabant - East German Plastic Car Turns 50

Tim Osswald

On November 7, 1957, the first phenolic-cotton composite bodied car rolled off the assembly line in Zwickau, East Germany. When the  Trabant factory closed its doors, and the last Trabi rolled off its assembly line in 1991, it had produced over 3 million cars, making it, for better or for worse, an East German symbol. Today, only 50,000 of the two-stroke engine Trabants roll on Germany’s roads, primarily in the east, and there is renewed talk about reviving this nostalgic cult vehicle.  

trabant.jpg 

Leave a Reply

*
To prove you're a person (not a spam script), type the security word shown in the picture. Click on the picture to hear an audio file of the word.
Click to hear an audio file of the anti-spam word