Trabant

A car manufacturer from the former East Germany, responsible for a vehicle generally regarded as amongst the worst ever produced, inferior even by the modest standards of Eastern-bloc vehicle design.

Featuring a small but pollutant-belching [two stroke]? engine endowing the vehicle with, er, "modest" performance, the Trabant's real flaw was its plastic composite body. Providing virtually no crash protection, the plastic is an environmental disaster, both for the workers who produced the car, and for wreckers who struggle to find an environmentally-acceptable way to dispose of the misbegotten vehicle.

What happened to the Trabant factory post-1989?

See Automobile.