Trabant

East Germany’s answer to the people’s car: a small, front-wheel-drive saloon with a two-stroke twin and body panels made of duroplast (a hard plastic moulded from recycled cotton waste and phenol resin) because the country had plenty of that and not enough sheet steel.^[1] Four models were built across 34 years on essentially one 1950s design, and by the time production stopped in 1991 the car itself had become a symbol of the economy that built it, remembered as much for what never changed about it as for what it was.