Bag An Awful But Unbelievably Cool Trabant For Just £1600

There are times when a car is so bad, that it becomes indescribably cool as a consequence. One such motor is the Trabant. Manufactured in East Germany during the Cold War years, the Trabant was a runabout for thousands upon thousands of men and women in the communist Eastern Bloc. Its basic steel chassis is clad in a recycled plastic body, while power comes from a noisy, polluting 600cc two-stroke engine that puffs out just 25bhp.

As such, it's really not that quick. Despite only weighing 600kg, 0-62mph takes well over 20 seconds, and once you get to 62mph, it'll go no further, as that's the top speed. Early models didn't even have a fuel gauge, instead making do with a dipstick in the tank.

It's not just bad, it's laughably awful, and that gives the Trabant an undeniably endearing quality. They were exported to countries outside the Eastern Bloc, but never in big numbers, so in the UK, these things are properly rare. And if, like this estate example that's up for sale, it has some modifications, we're suddenly swooning with lust.

The news gets better, as the car for sale here has the 1.0-litre VW Polo engine fitted to the very last Trabants which rolled off the production line (production ran from 1957-1991) rather than the old two-stroke. It also has a crankshaft, rods, cylinder head and ECU taken from a 1.3-litre Mk2 Golf engine, and sits nice and low on 15-inch Revolution alloys courtesy of the installed set of adjustable coilovers.

It's up for £1600 which, considering how unbelievably cool and rare the Trabant is, is an utter bargain in our books. In fact, we are genuinely tempted to grab it for ourselves. Someone pick up the phone before we do.