In the middle of 1988, the Czech motoring community was alive with the arrival of Favorit. Sinfully expensive and factory-tuned, but still modern. It was a twenty-year leap forward for Škoda. In East Germany the mood was more somber. The new four-stroke engine was built into a twenty-year-old body on a frame chassis. The troubled economy of the GDR could not do more.
The consistently angular Wartburg 353 was one of the road stalwarts of the Eastern Bloc. In 1968, it was about modern and elegant shapes, under which, however, for the most part, technology from the late 1930s was hidden.
The planned economy demonstrated a particularly strong inability to innovate under the conditions of war-torn Germany. From today’s point of view, it is striking that while the older round Wartburg 311 was produced for thirteen years, the later type 353 for twenty-three. Its only improvement was independent rear suspension and coil springs instead of leaf springs.
The excessively heavy frame chassis remained, as did the two-stroke engine, from which Western manufacturers had already retreated in the late 1960s. Even the designers in Eisenach did not want to put up with it, and over the years they prepared several alternatives.
The first was a 16-cylinder engine with OHC distribution from the early 1970s, which for its time was a completely modern solution common to brands such as Audi or BMW. The engine was ready in 1972, when the communist leadership rejected it with a view to a joint project with Škoda.
Let us recall that he counted on combining the strengths of the industries of both countries. The Germans would supply the front drive, the Czechs a four-stroke engine. However, the plans involving the supply of several factories on both sides of the Ore Mountains turned out to be too demanding, so the German side withdrew from them a year later.
However, the 16th for Wartburg, who had to continue with the two-stroke engine, remained on the ice. This became fatal for him in the following years. For the year 1979, the then European Community announced stricter emission limits, which left a place for two-strokes only in motorcycles.
While the countries of the Eastern Bloc readily circumvented emissions with exceptions, Britain announced a ban on two-stroke engines as early as 1976, followed by other countries such as Denmark, Belgium, Spain or Greece. There everywhere were exported by the Wartburgs at that time and provided the East German economy with hard currency.
This development caught the socialist planners completely unprepared, fifteen hundred unsaleable Wartburgs were then left standing on the factory floor. The authorities had no choice but to release them for the domestic market, which pleased customers waiting on ten-year waiting lists, but deprived the state bank of hundreds of thousands of pounds, guilders and pesetas.
Economy Minister Günter Mittag, who is otherwise famous for saying that Trabants and Wartburgs are good enough for the citizens of East Germany, then pushed for a solution worthy of a smart burner. In the plan for 1978, he included a limited series of 7500 cars for export, which were to receive a four-stroke engine.
It is hard to find a stronger illustration of the causes of East German misery. Even in the highest places, they did not understand that the development of a new engine and the preparation of production costs billions, which will pay off only in large quantities.
The plan also soon proved to be impassable for investment. The unmanageable winter calamity at the turn of 1978 and 1979 dealt him a definitive blow, which caused incalculable damage to the fragile economy.
Unplanned power outages then, for example, damaged steel blast furnaces, froze tens of thousands of farm animals, and the government had to buy coal from West Germany. For currencies that were supposed to be provided, among other things, by the export of cars.
They did not give up in Eisenach. At the beginning of the eighties, they prepared a new four-stroke engine, this time a more modest three-cylinder 1.2 liter. You can still enjoy yourself in the factory museum listen to a working prototype. But the money for production was not found again.
At the same time, Volkswagen was facing the opposite problem. Rising living standards made labor more expensive in West German factories. Carl Hahn’s management hatched plans to produce a model smaller than the Polo, hinted at by the Student concept.
The car or its parts could be made more cheaply in East Germany, but the government there lacked the money and determination to respond to even such a concrete incentive.
In 1984, Volkswagen designed an even more welcoming store. He would supply a complete engine production line himself. The GDR would repay the investment with their deliveries, and at the same time, the engines would also be allowed to be installed in East German cars.
Minister Mittag agreed. It was a rare opportunity to visibly alleviate the obvious backwardness of domestic industry. He pushed through the plan despite the opposition of his party colleagues, who saw it as a concession to the hated capitalism.
And also to the great disappointment of the designers in Eisenach. Instead of their own engine, they were supposed to build a foreign one, which was dimensionally incompatible. And that’s even in a hopelessly outdated body.
The first prototype kept the engine mounted longitudinally in front of the axle. This required an extension to the bow, so no one called him anything other than “nosal”. Tests quickly showed poor driving characteristics, the car was too heavy for the nose.
All that was left was to build the engine across, which meant modifying the frame and developing a new transmission that had to fit into the Trabant as well. Even with it, the unit fit between the fenders of the Wartburg extremely tightly.
Before they prepared all this in the planned economy, it was September 1988, and with many adjustments, the whole event became sky-high. For example, when signing the contract, Minister Mittag had no idea how much money would be needed to get the East German suppliers to meet Volkswagen’s standards.
The total bill was close to nine billion marks. That is, twice as much as the engineers from Eisenach estimated for the production of their own engine, which they already had ready.
The complete irony of the whole story is crowned by the deliveries of engines to Volkswagen, which did not begin until December 4, 1989, a month after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
On the open European market, the Wartburg 1.3 represented no more than a curiosity. It was sold only in a few countries of the just-collapsed Eastern Bloc, it only came to the Czech Republic as a used car. Production finally ended in April 1991, when the factory in Eisenach was taken over by Opel.
2023-08-27 05:39:38
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