FANS of the Trabant, once dubbed the “BMW of the East”, drove their prized possessions into Košice on July 7 and 8 to celebrate the model’s 50th anniversary.
Though usually the butt of everyone’s jokes, the Trabant had plenty of fans at this gathering.
“It’s an excellent car,” Daniel Presuľ, a 22-year old Trabant owner from Košice, told the Pravda daily. “It is simple and fast. It can go up to 110 kilometres per hour and you could give it a complete overhaul on the side of the road. I’ve dreamed about owning one since childhood.”
Marcelko, as Presuľ calls his beige 1972 Trabant 601, was one of the 68 cars at the city’s sixth national Trabant gathering.
Unofficial figures show that about 5,000 Trabants are still on Slovak roads.
In its heyday, more than 132,000 units of the car were imported into the former Czechoslovakia. It was the cheapest car on the market. In the 1970s, it cost Sk36,000 (€1,000), more than 14 times the average wage at the time, Pravda wrote.
