At Climate Depot the ever active Marc Morano brings our attention to the troubles dogging the massively subsidized GM Chevy Volt and compares it to the communist East German Trabant:
Neil Cavuto however admits he doesn’t know what a “Trabi” is. Nothing wrong with that – not everyone can have the fortune of being brought up in communist East Germany – that state run socialist paradise that America now longs to be. So I thought I’d show Neil what he missed out on living in the capitalistic West.
Worse than Inspector Columbo’s car!
My first experience with a Trabi was back in early 1990, just after I had first moved from the US to West Germany and the Wall had fallen. With the border open and East Germans free again to travel unrestricted for the first time in 30+ years, many of them took a drive into West Germany for the first time. On the autobahns Beamers, Audis, and Mercedes Benzes were zooming by in the fast lane at 140 mph as the tiny two-stroke 25 hp Trabants could barely muster going 50 mph. The contrast between West and East could not have been more stark.
East Germans had to wait 15 years for delivery of a new Trabi. Not because demand for them was high – but because it took that long for the state-run factories to build and deliver them. In 1990, the Trabant was technically stuck in the 1940s. If you had an accident in it, the best you could hope for was a quick death.
East German TV spot
Here’s the Trabant 601 – with 600 cc air-cooled 2-stroke engine, fully synchronized 4-speed transmission, 28 mpg highway! Available in any color (as long as it’s beige).
So get your new Government Motors Chevy Volt today, and relive the good ol communist days! Folks, this is what the state-planned, government-run economy can deliver – if only you’ll just give it the chance.
So Neil was right about one thing: It was a real doozie.
Now just supposing the Trabant had a 525 hp two stroke engine…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=19eQBQep-sc
As far as I remember, the Trabi’s were made of a certain kind of plastic. Whether they drove that slowly, I do not know. Before the fall of communism, on the transit route to Berlin, we always had to adapt our speed to the Trabi’s. If you drove more than one hundred kilometres per hour, you could get a severe fine, to be paid in West Marks. Everywhere helicopters were in air watching us. Quite exciting to reach Berlin without fines.
The hull was made of a pastic-wood mixture; very brittle. Where a normal car would be dented slightly by an impact, a Trabant just shatters. I’ve seen that.
There are lots of Trabant jokes.
Q: Why doesn’t a Trabbie driver need ear warmers?
A: He already has his knees for that.
(They were pretty tiny and forced taller people into contortions.)
8,000 cars on the road, 4,000 at dealers, Chevy: “This is not a recall!” (It’s a customer service campaign)
http://laist.com/2012/01/06/general_motors_wants_the_owners.php
Go Government Motors!
German TV, ZDF, broadcasts German-dubbed version of the BBC’s “Frozen Planet” series. It looks like Germans miss out on part 6, the CAGW scare part. Which is astonishing – ZDF is public TV, Germans are mostly gullible arch-warmists, so why don’t the public broadcasters give the Germans climate p0rn when it’s already produced? What have they to lose?
http://terra-x.zdf.de/ZDFde/inhalt/14/0,1872,8416878,00.html
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eisige_Welten
BTW, the zdf website doesn’t admit anywhere that it’s just a BBC production, and that their only participation in the product was the German language overdub. Why do they choose to come across as stonewalling liars; it takes a 5 second web check to find that out.