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In fact, a Saturn was a luxury car compared to the Worst Car Ever award-winner. That distinction goes to the Trabant, a dreadful vehicle produced from 1957 to 1990 by the former East German [i.e. Communist] car manufacturer VEB Sachsenring Automobilwerke Zwickau. Perhaps it’s no surprise that the 1957 Trabant had no tachometer, no turn signal, no seat belts or fuel gauge, no trunk liner, and used an oil/gas mix. The fact that these basic amenities were still missing when Taylor Swift was born [1989] is a bit more surprising. East Germans considered themselves lucky just to get a Trabant....

Get ready, folks. America has bought a car company. As of Monday, we, the taxpayers, own a majority stake in General Motors Corp. Whether the company will be formally renamed Government Motors remains to be seen. But that's what it will be. GM filed for bankruptcy Monday. Instead of putting the failed car enterprise into bankruptcy six months ago - where Carl Icahn or Wilbur Ross could have bought it - the Bush administration chose Bailout Nation. Under Team Obama, that bailout has morphed into full-scale government ownership. Twenty billion dollars of Troubled Asset Relief Program money is already invested...

BERLIN (Reuters) - Nearly two decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall a German company plans to give the Trabant, a stinky two-cylinder car that became the symbol of communist East Germany, a new lease of life. The new Trabants will no longer have tiny engines, noxious fumes and plastic bodies but will retain the iconic design of the original -- like Volkswagen's new Beetle or the new Mini. The Trabant was the most common vehicle in the former East Germany and was produced without major changes for nearly 30 years. Known in the West as a "spark plug...

Touring Nowa Huta in Crazy Mike's Trabants 6.10.2006 - John Beauchamp The southern polish city of Krakow attracts visitors from all over the world - to its churches, narrow streets and great central square. And now there's another tourist attraction - retro communism. You can joins some Crazy Guides on a Trabant ride round Nowa Huta, a model communist city designed in the 1950s. This report by John Beauchamp: Crazy Mike has souped-up his Trabants and he's going to be taking us around Nowa Huta. 'Nowa who?' I hear you say. Well, far from the crowds of tourists that pack...

Trabant collection annoys neighboursFrom correspondents in London March 5, 2004 (Article didn't have any pics w/ it so I went ahead as added this one I googled.)</> FORTY-NINE Trabants - the homely little East German car that symbolised the demise of communism in Eastern Europe - have found a new home in a genteel English village but the neighbours are up in arms. Graham Goodall, 58, a retired auto engineer, collects "Trabbies" and parks them in the yard behind his listed stone farmhouse in postcard-pretty Middleton-by-Youlgreave, Derbyshire, in the English Midlands. "I think they are beautiful cars ... a part...