Spotted: Communist cars with happy endings

Reader Peter Lloyd sent along an amazing collection of pictures from his trip through Europe. Among them was the Trabant, which has been pressed into service as a rolling advertisement for a massage parlor. It looks like the owner got a discount on auxiliary headlights.

With headlights mounted at the base of the windshield and a shape that conjures up a rolling goldfish bowl, the Fiat Multipla is one of the car world’s strangest creatures. But you can always make it even weirder by painting every body panel a different color. Peter Lloyd spotted this multicolor Multipla in Budapest.

You may have heard about chopping and channeling, the post-war hotrod craze that involved cutting down a car’s roof and dropping it lower on its frame. Peter Lloyd spotted this customized VW Beetle in Prague, Czechoslovakia.

You can’t cut a roof down much more than this without installing a periscope.

As you may know, the Trabant was built in the former East Germany. Communism may have died, but the Trabant lives on as a rolling symbol of the “worker’s paradise.” Peter Lloyd spotted this one, complete with reflective sunshade, in Budapest.

The Trabant was a true people’s car, designed to keep costs down so workers could afford it. (Unfortunately, this feature was compromised by a combination of East German bureaucratic ineptitude and black-marketeering that jacked up the price.) By the time production ended in 1991, 3.7 million had been built.

Here’s another Trabant from Peter Lloyd’s visit to Budapest. The Trabant’s body panels were molded from Duroplast, a composite created by mixing cotton waste from the Soviet Union with phenol resins from the East German dye industry. The Trabant hit the market in 1957, long before the car industry became interested in recycling. Unfortunately, the green cred the Trabant earned with its innovative body panels was more than offset its two-stroke motor, which sucked fuel and left behind a rooster tail of noxious blue smoke.

With the rise of digital ignition systems that make it almost impossible to steal a car, you don’t see many of these “club”-style steering-wheel locks any more. But when you own a Trabant that can be hot-wired with nothing more than a paper clip and a screwdriver, the club still makes sense. Peter Lloyd spotted this one in Budapest.

My friend Paul Hodgson is an avid chronicler of the cruising scene in Toronto’s tony Yorkville district. He spotted this clever custom plate on a Jaguar.

Reader Steve Van Esch spotted this customized BMW in the Azores. Looks like that airbrush artist could use a little more practice.

After studying the custom BMW for a while, I realized that the design on the hood was actually a portrait of the Grim Reaper. It seems that the airbrush artist (I am using the term loosely) owned only a single paint color.

I spotted this battered VW in Toronto. As far as I could tell, it’s still being driven. A bumper held on with a bungee cord doesn’t inspire a lot of confidence.

When a friend noticed the key fob from an E-bike I was riding for a recent road test, he pulled out the one for his new BMW. It isn’t hard to see where the Xinri E-bike company found its design inspiration. (If you want to see the E-bike story, here’s the link: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-drive/adventure/red-line/uneasy-rider-peter-cheneys-week-on-an-e-bike/article20770550/)