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 [Editor’s note: It was Shakespeare who penned, “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so”—wisdom that certainly applies to the world of the automobile. While others compile lists of “Worst Cars,” we prefer to see the glass as half-full, hence the reason for the new “Misunderstood Cars” series. In it, we’ll tackle cars that have long received a bad rap, beginning with Jeff Koch’s take on the oft-maligned Trabant.]
The year is 1964, and a young man’s dreams turn to sketching his ideal sports car. Thoughts of rack-and-pinion steering, four-wheel independent suspension with a firm ride that you can feel in the small of your back, unit-body construction, an air-cooled engine, four forward gears you shift yourself, bucket seats, lightweight composite body panels that never rust, German build quality, a no-nonsense cabin with radio delete, a sub-80-inch wheelbase and a sub-1400-pound curb weight flitter across the grey matter in a tantalizing tease of fantasy and unobtanium. (A lot of that spec sounds suspiciously like Porsche, or perhaps even Volkswagen.) We’ll bet a lot of sports cars so equipped were doodled in school notebooks of that era—we’ll bet you probably have a couple of those notebooks, up in your attic somewhere. It all sounds like the stuff of sports car delight – and for the early ’60s, a lot of it is pretty advanced, though none of it is impossible or out-of-time.
Shifting the conversation on a classic auto that was ahead of its time.
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Re: Misunderstood Cars: The VEB Sachsenring Trabant
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