What do you think of this fact?
When you think of cars, you think of steel. The Trabant, East Germany’s most famous car, had other ideas. Its body was made of Duroplast: cotton soaked in phenolic resin and pressed into shape.
Plastic instead of steel
The German car magazine KÜS Magazin describes the outer skin of the Trabant P 601 as pressed cotton parts soaked in phenolic resin. Phenolic resin is a synthetic resin that sets hard and can’t be reshaped afterwards. Combined with the cotton fibers, it makes a hard, light material.
Why go to all that trouble? According to KÜS Magazin, there were two reasons. First, the car was supposed to be lighter. Second, sheet steel for car bodies was simply in short supply in East Germany’s planned economy. Necessity turned into a technique that sounds almost futuristic today.
People still gave the Trabi a not-so-flattering nickname: “Pappe”, German for cardboard. Duroplast has nothing to do with cardboard, though.
Almost three million cars
The P 601 went into production in July 1964. It was powered by an air-cooled two-cylinder two-stroke engine, first with 23 horsepower, from 1969 with 26. By 1989, according to KÜS Magazin, 2,821,381 cars of this model had been built.
From 1988 to 1991 there was also the Trabant 1.1, now with an engine from VW. On April 30, 1991, the last Trabant rolled off the line in Zwickau. It carries the vehicle number 3,096,099, is pink, and is now kept in the depot of the August Horch Museum.
According to autohaus.de, about 30,000 of the roughly three million Trabis ever built were still around in 2011.
And where the last Trabi rolled off the line, Volkswagen was building Golfs and Passats by then, according to the same report. No more cotton in the bodywork there.
A car partly made of the same stuff as your T-shirt, just a lot harder.