The agreement sounds like it often smells in authorities: In December 1971, the Joint Economic Committee of the GDR and Czechoslovakia (CSSR) "measures to prepare an intergovernmental agreement on long-term cooperation and division of labor in the field of development and production of passenger cars". DDR and CSSR wanted to build joint cars, in short: cool carts. Vehicles that can compete with West makes - and above all should also be available in sufficient numbers on the market.
In Sozen-Sprech the project was - of course - not very sonorous: RGW-Auto. The abbreviation RGW stood for "Council for Mutual Economic Assistance", it was an organization in which the former Eastern Bloc countries coordinated their economic cooperation. For the RGW car so DDR and CSSR wanted to make common cause and kill three birds with one stone: namely at a stroke a successor to the outdated car models Wartburg 353, Trabant 601 and Skoda 100 on the wheels.
For the two GDR manufacturers, the deal was particularly attractive: they should get in this way access to four-stroke engines from Skoda production to finally be able to replace their pötternden two-stroke.
Even when choosing the drive, there was a dispute
Skoda should therefore contribute the engines, while gears, PTO shafts and axles from GDR production were planned. On the common technical basis, in turn, "national" bodies should be created to ensure the desired differentiation of the individual makes. But even with the basic configuration, the ghosts were divided: Various sources speak that the Czechoslovakian engineers favored a rear-engined car with rear-wheel drive, a configuration that had a tradition at Skoda, but at the time was considered outdated. The GDR experts wanted a car with front engine and front-wheel drive. They finally prevailed.
In the first test vehicles, the engine, a 1.1-liter four-cylinder four-stroke engine with 45 HP of Skoda, then even placed in front of the front axle. While in Zwickau (Trabant) and Eisenach (Wartburg) in-house designers made to the body conception, Skoda engaged the Italian design office Giugiaro, the drafts for three variants - sedan, three-door, station wagon delivered. From 1976, the RGW car should be made, together, an annual production of about 600,000 vehicles was planned.
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Jürgen Pander
Unique !: The most bizarre concept cars
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In fact, not a single production model was built. Already in April 1973, the project was qualified by the political bodies as "not ready for decision". Presumably, the high-flying plans failed because of financing difficulties. In the GDR there was silence about the failure. Officially, nothing had happened anyway, because in the five-year plans of 1971 and 1976, the planned figures for car production were missing.
Despondent in the impasse
Although the RGW car was dead, it lived on in many different ways. Skoda continued to build prototypes, which eventually emerged in the eighties, the production model Skoda Favorit. Also in the GDR, partly still in loose association with Skoda engineers, on the basis of the RGW cars further constructed. This is how the project P 610 came into being, in which the car factories in Zwickau and Eisenach worked together again. But in 1979 the Politburo finally ended these new developments.
What remained were the well-known types Wartburg 353 and Trabant 601, two conceptually overhauled cars, which always received only the most necessary refreshments - after all, there were the promising development projects such as the RGW car. When these were then finally canceled, the GDR car industry had already fallen into a backlog, which could no longer catch up.
How the car history could have looked like, had become something from the RGW car, can hardly be estimated. After all, there are still a few visual objects from the seventies. The surviving prototypes of the socialist vehicle industry of that era are now in the Skoda Museum in Mladá Boleslav, Czech Republic, and in the August Horch Museum in Zwickau.