Trabant Showrooms

Posting this on 28 November 2016, a day after posting a Blip of a Trabant.

I was working for Inchcape plc driving around Western Europe enjoying the sights, sounds and foods of places like Paris, Luxembourg, Nice, Toulouse when on 18th March 1992, I got a call from my UK finance boss Martyn E. I was in the shower at the Scandic Crown Hotel in Dortmund and looking forward to a hearty breakfast. It was not to be.

"There is a seat booked on a flight from Dortmund to Berlin in an hour. Be on it! Someone will pick you up at the airport there and explain"

So it came to pass that lobster in Nice and Filet Mignon in Paris were no longer to be for me. I was now General Manager of two BMW dealerships, neither of which had a showroom, let alone a car or an employee. The sites were Halle and Dessau in the former East Germany. I will fill in more detail in future posts.

Within a few days, one of the potential sites offered to me for the future Dessau operation was the former Trabant sales showroom, workshops and customer delivery site. A very weird sounding person on the telephone had given me the address and meeting time. On arrival, business cards were swapped, the one I now held had a weird sounding company name and address somewhere in Luxembourg.

Did a tour of the desolate site. It had actually been used by a VW dealer just before us but they had "moved on". What a scene of run down dinginess. I was accompanied by a young guy Michael W who I had now employed as the GM for the future Dessau site. He was an East German "recommended" by BMW and had applied to them for a job when the wall came down. He lived in Dessau and knew the scene. In his early 20's he had witnessed his father taking delivery of the family Trabant at that site some years before. A momentous occasion and only thanks to having some useful connections, had the father only waited 15 years.

The site was 8000sqm and was being offered for sale at 350DM/sqm. About 2km away was a brand new industrial park "Junckers Park" being constructed costing 120DM/sqm. The old Trabant site would have costed a fortune to bring up to modern day technical and environmental standards. Michael was also pretty sure that the ground would be polluted with all sorts of oils and chemicals and as soon as we put a spade in the ground, the environmental bodies would be there to tell us to have the soil carted away and disposed of at great cost as "dangerous  material".

We didn't take up the offer, as inviting as it was to have four walls, a roof and a ready to go workshop with lifts. Michael is in the photo of the workshop. I think a Lada 4x4 in the background.

I am not 100% sure of the date. It was April according to my notes on the photo but as my diary, mobile phone and many other things were stolen in the course of my time there, I don't any longer have the info. Thought April fools Day was appropriate.