Re: IML: The Cold War and Chrysler's Forward Look hit piece

[Christopher Hoffman <imperial67@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Kenyon and Neal,

This is a fabulous piece, obvious meant to show off the wonderful American
lifestyles in the pictures as much as the products. (I'll take the house
behind the Plymouth, thanks!) Very cool. (And the brass it took to even name
a car Imperial... why not flaunt the new Capitalist in their faces?

One point of information: the Trabant was built in East Germany, and was
sold primarily in East Germany, not Russia. Russians were more likely to buy
a locally built Moskvich, which had a metal body and hydraulic brakes. While
there was some exporting of cars from one Eastern block country to another,
typically Skodas and Tatras stayed in Czechoslovokia, Trabbies stayed in
East Germany, and so forth. The East German cars were actually the more
ingenious, IMHO, because they weren't just copies of American (or other)
cars, and they focused on innovations in manufacturing and simple upkeep. In
other words, they were designed to have owners (i.e., to sell!), while the
Russian auto industry's primary goal seemed to be keeping cars away from
customers. 

The Trabant's resin body and two-stroke engine were crude but effective, and
East Germans could actually afford them at a rate far higher than Russian
citizens (and without as long a wait). Another East German car, the
Wartburg, was designed for ease of manufacture, a stark contrast to the
inefficiency of Russian auto plants which consistently operated at a mere
fraction of their capacity.

Meanwhile, back in the US, everyone in the 1950s had a new befinned Forward
Look wonder in their two-car garage, and pushbutton appliances inside their
sleek new house, and a barbecue out back around which they'd enjoy cocktails
and parties every evening... Oh, and we can harness atoms and fly to space,
too. Or so life was depicted.) I cannot think of a more effective tool to
incite a popular uprising than to show a "better way of life." Kind of makes
me want to go back there, too, though maybe without quite so much atomic
energy...

-- 
Chris in LA
67 Crown
78 NYB Salon




On 3/26/05 9:00 PM, Kenyon Wills (imperialist1960@xxxxxxxxx) wrote:

> If you've never seen a Trabant up close, which was the
> car being built for the People of Russia at the time,
> it is such a far cry from western cars as to be
> laughable.  The one that I inspected in the early
> 1990's was a relatively recent 1985 model and it had
> totally mechanical rod linkages that operated the
> braking system.  It's my understanding that as with
> Checker Cabs, they designed them and then just ran the
> assembly line forever without much change.



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