The former (Thank God!) East German government used to make a car like this: tiny, underpowered, unreliable and poorly designed. It was called the Trabant.
If they had imported Trabants into the U.S. there might have been a nuclear war in central Europe.
I once heard a curious story about the Trabant. Used Trabbies supposedly commanded higher prices than a new one fresh from the factory. The reason was (allegedly) that the inefficient, state-run East German auto industry could never keep up with the queue. As a result, you had to wait months for a new Trabant, but could get a used one right away.
I read somewhere that the body panels on those cars were made of cardboard.
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! .......................... FRegards