𝕋𝕙𝕖 𝔸𝕖𝕥𝕙𝕖𝕣𝕤𝕥𝕣𝕖𝕒𝕞

Here’s a utopian photo of the socialist dream: getting into an East German Trabant—meaning “satellite,” and named after the Soviet Sputnik. In East Germany’s socialist, centrally planned economy, there was no competition. The government decided exactly how many cars would be built, what they would look like, and how much they would cost. Because demand always vastly exceeded supply, the state could sell every Trabant it made, no matter how outdated or poorly assembled it was. While the Western automotive industry was rapidly innovating with crumple zones, turbochargers, and electronic fuel injection, the East German state forced its citizens to pay upfront and wait 12 to 15 years for a car built around 1930s technology: a two-stroke engine. The Stasi (Secret Police) background checks were required just to get on the waiting list. Because the waiting list was so agonizingly long, a bizarre economic phenomenon occurred: a used Trabant was worth more than a brand-new one. If you managed to get a new Trabant after 12 years, you could drive it off the lot and immediately sell it on the black market for up to twice its retail price. People paid a massive premium simply to skip the 12-year line. When the Berlin Wall finally fell in 1989, East Germans flooded into West Germany, and thousands simply abandoned their Trabants by the side of the road, choosing to walk away from a symbol of 30 years of low-powered vehicles and economic stagnation.