Dr Jeff Cornwall

If you have spent any time here in the former East Germany, you undoubtedly know about the Trabant.  I took the picture above on the streets of Dresden this morning.  It got me thinking…  Is this a glimpse of the future for GM?

Here is how Time described this ill-fated, government conceived automobile when naming it one of the 50 worst cars of all time:

This is the car that gave Communism a bad name. Powered by a two-stroke
pollution generator that maxed out at an ear-splitting 18 hp, the
Trabant was a hollow lie of a car constructed of recycled worthlessness
(actually, the body was made of a fiberglass-like Duroplast, reinforced
with recycled fibers like cotton and wood). A virtual antique when it
was designed in the 1950s, the Trabant was East Germany’s answer to the
VW Beetle — a “people’s car,” as if the people didn’t have enough to
worry about. Trabants smoked like an Iraqi oil fire, when they ran at
all, and often lacked even the most basic of amenities, like brake
lights or turn signals. But history has been kind to the Trabi.
Thousands of East Germans drove their Trabants over the border when the
Wall fell, which made it a kind of automotive liberator. Once across
the border, the none-too-sentimental Ostdeutschlanders immediately
abandoned their cars. Ich bin Junk!

I think I have to agree with Glenn Beck’s assessment of the future for GM under government control:

What kind of innovation can we expect from
“Government Motors”? With people who’ve never run a business, like
Barney Frank, in charge, we may be setting ourselves up to repeat
another part of history: We could all be driving the same car, kind of
like East Germany’s Trabant or the old Soviet Union’s Lada.