"Cé hé sin" (michael-m-mouse)
03/11/2016 at 15:01 • Filed to: Wartburg
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"Cé hé sin" (michael-m-mouse)
03/11/2016 at 15:01 • Filed to: Wartburg | 0
| 9 |
In the good old days of the DDR you had to wait half a lifetime to buy the pinnacle of East German motoring achievement, a Wartburg.
!!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! how it went for the proud owner of a late model (capitalist four stroke engine) 1.3.
Recent picture of a Wartburg 1.3 looking better than it would have new. Except for the dent.
Daily Drives a Dragon - One Last Lap
> Cé hé sin
03/11/2016 at 15:12 |
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Is it bad that I want one of these and a Trabant?
Berang
> Cé hé sin
03/11/2016 at 15:15 |
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Yeah but the trunk!
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Cé hé sin
> Daily Drives a Dragon - One Last Lap
03/11/2016 at 15:25 |
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Well, it’s different.
Prices are going up...
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Daily Drives a Dragon - One Last Lap
> Cé hé sin
03/11/2016 at 15:28 |
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Dammit.
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Cé hé sin
> Daily Drives a Dragon - One Last Lap
03/11/2016 at 15:36 |
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Not up very far it must be said but the days of buying a running Trabi for a couple of hundred euro are over.
My hovercraft is full of eels
> Cé hé sin
03/11/2016 at 15:40 |
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My parents originally applied for a Skoda 120 in Hungary. However, the Chechoslovakians stopped making the 120 to convert factory capacities to the Favorit. Therefore, the state dealership (the only body entitled to sell new cars in the country) notified us to choose from the other options. Ultimately, my parents went for the Wartburg 1.3. (BTW, due to the long waiting list for new cars, the price on young used cars was higher than on new ones. We bought the Wartburg for 200.000 HUF, and similar, but half-year-old cars went for around 220.000.)
In the summer of 1989, we were given a date for taking over our new car. My parents asked me and my brother about the color they should choose (they could not choose in advance, but had to go there on the given date and pick a car). We said green or blue, but definitely not white, as we had an old white Lada 1200 at the time.
When the big day came, they took a train to the headquarters of Merkur (the state car dealership) located in southern Budapest’s Csepel Island. My brother and me were hanging in the window of our apartment the entire day. Finally, in the late afternoon, my mom and dad returned with our new car... a white Wartburg.
As they told us, the only other available color option was a very ugly, khaki-like shade of green (see the pic below), so we understood.
The car had no problems whatsoever, it ran beautifully. The 4-speed manual transmission was a piece of crap, nothing like the gearbox in the old Lada, but that was how all such Wartburgs came out of the factory.
The radiator broke about 10 months later, and my parents had to fight Merkur to have it replaced under warranty, but that was it.
This is how we took over our family’s first new car... just 3 days before Hungary’s last communist leader died, and about 3,5 months before communism finally fell in the country.
The Wartburg served us well, both me and my brother learned to drive on it. By the early 2000s it became rather hard to acquire good quality spare parts, and we finally sold the car in 2002 with only 74k kilometres on the odometer.
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Cé hé sin
> My hovercraft is full of eels
03/11/2016 at 15:47 |
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I remember seeing Wartburgs and Trabis when I was in Germany in 2001 and all the Wartburgs seemed to be in muddy brown or green while the Trabis were usually grey.
You could still buy two stroke mixture at filling stations in the old East at the time.
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Cé hé sin
> My hovercraft is full of eels
03/11/2016 at 15:54 |
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Cars like that are advertised for upwards of €5,000 now!
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My hovercraft is full of eels
> Cé hé sin
03/11/2016 at 16:24 |
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Two colors were common on Trabis (at least here): light gray and powder blue. Apart from that, there were a few shades of green and yellow, but that was pretty much it.
As I remember, the old, 2-stroke Wartburgs (the 353s) had a much wider range of color options, and some rather pretty colors as well.