I hadn't thought of that!

Or how many live family members you could stuff in there as you tried to escape the place.

Ah you can't really rate a country because its cars, houses, food, clothing etc.. were awful. You can however rate a country based on how high it builds its walls to keep its citizens in, how much it relys on its secret police to supress freedom and how it is eventually destroyed - by its own people....

Ahh the proletareat at work...

In one of the adverts for the Trabant 601 it was proudly stated that it had "room for much luggage". The Trabant was much smaller than the Wartburg.

Why would you want to fit 57 footballs in the back of your car unless you work for some international football manufacturing conglomerate? First priority would be how many medium sized suitcases you can fit in.

What's wild to me is they kept those same body styles throughout the decades. So did Checker cabs but you could fit about 150 soccer balls in their trunks.

omg, TOO MUCH PROSPERITY!!

socialism is step forward to utopia, capitalism is step backward from utopia. Both have their pros and cons. But when your rulers are gangsters you are in deep shit no matter what the regime is. Capitalist gangsters, communist gangsters they have no concern for the stare, they are just greedy for power and wealth, nothing else.

In capitalist world now its exactly the opposite thing, The contructors are so productive than we have many cars not sold. Beaucoup trop de marques de voitures chez GM, trop de produits qui ne se vendent pas, ça créé des faillites gigantesque. Le capitalisme n'est pas un modèle parfait.

Well, it's not doing so well at all, and many people in east Germany are longing back to the times of socialism. Many dream of building up the wall again. Because under socialism, they all had a house, food, income and free healthcare. Today there is huge unemployment and hundreds of people living on the streets in total poverty. Plucking the fruits of capitalism.... The DDR really wasn't all bad, but their biggest mistake was just that they imprisoned themselves.

im surprised they didnt have the russians, or any other eastern bloc country help them out a bit, that couldve made the wait shorter

slimv29, it doesnt take long to build a trabant, it is rather quite easy and fast. What the problem was is that they merely had shortages of supplies to make the car. Remember, when your a socialist police country, you dont take in imports from other "democratic" and "free" countries, you have to produce them yourself. In east germany you had about three options, trabant, wartburg or take the train. Two car companies cant hold up a country of millions. Gruss von Rheinland-Pfalz mein freund

that is absurd that you had to wait around 10-15 years for a trabant (come on, they couldnt take that long to build), i mean, i dont remember hearing about having to wait for a zastava, lada, or a polski fiat in order to buy those

LOL they were very fast.

Alles noch echte Handarbeit - this was all real handmade work!! :)( Fast - Almost )

Yeah... And I grow up in Poland, I was 12 when communism in this part of world felt up. I remember then our first car - Wartburg. Think what u want, in those times it was a car. Hard to belive from US or UK, I know. But it's history, guys. And we saw it. Now even we are looking at that and we're... well, suprised! Changes...

Just compare East Germany with the Third Reich as rival dictatorships. There is no comparison! The Third Reich leaves the GDR in the dust!

The Wartberg's best feature was that one can put 57 footballs in the boot. Couldn't do that with the Trabant.

How caught up is the East with the West nowadays? Anybody know?