When one considers the automobile’s role in the German state of Saxony today, thoughts turn to Porsche’s modern facility in Leipzig—the one churning out Panameras, Cayennes, and Macans—or to BMW’s Leipzig plant, where the Bavarian concern’s i cars and 1- and 2-series vehicles are constructed. Thirty years ago, Saxony buzzed with the gutless two-stroke rap of locally built Trabants, the German Democratic Republic’s main contribution to 20th-century motoring and a deleterious reminder of what sad havoc totalitarianism’s ugly thumb can wreak on the glorious art of German automotive engineering.
Trabis are not, however, a common sight stateside, so imagine our surprise when we happened on one. It was parked up on some rocks on a parking barrier outside a Sinclair station on Utah’s State Route 63, the road into Bryce Canyon National Park. Judging by its patina, the Honecker-era runabout seemed to have been resting there for some time. Naturally, we pulled over and grabbed a couple of snaps, because, hey, fish-out-of-water Duroplast-bodied East German semi-reasonable motorcar facsimile! When we arrived at our hotel for the night, we couldn’t stop thinking about the little Trabi with its die-cut Bitburger stickers gradually evaporating in the sun. Naturally, we consulted the World Wide Web for more information.
Turns out, the car was used by a man named Rolf Becker to drive to the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City. He began the journey in Los Angeles, was advised by a friend to avoid Las Vegas and hit Reno instead, then drove on to Salt Lake. The car eventually wound up at Ruby’s Inn, the hotel across the street from the aforementioned service station. This isn’t the only car Becker has driven to the Olympic Games; the man has made something of a habit of the practice, although the last trip we could find any information on was his Magdeburg-to-Sochi drive of 2014.
Becker grew up in Halle, Saxony, where he became known as an expert barrel organist. He even once played the thing for 48 hours in pursuit of a record. And at some point after the fall of the Berlin Wall, he began driving Trabants all over the world, a smoky ambassador of East German culture. We’re not entirely sure how many Trabis Rolf has left behind along the way (he claims to have left cars on “all continents,” but we’re not sure about Antarctica), but running across this fabulously craptastic, sun-bleached, crusty piece of a bona-fide odd duck’s history was definitely a highlight of a fine day out.
And perhaps, on the eve of a U.S. presidential election featuring candidates with very different attitudes toward the Kremlin’s bare-chested brawler, in a contest rife with allegations of Russian meddling, it’s good to be reminded of the sort of thing that Russian meddling results in. A little bit of Duroplast is a fine and interesting thing to find out on the road, but by and large, we’d prefer to leave such things in the past.
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