Wartburg's Eisenach facilities were owned by BMW before World War 2, but fell into the postwar Soviet occupation zone that became the DDR in 1949. The Wartburg 311 was largely a repackaged IFW F9, the East German version of the DKW, a prewar Auto Union model that was also produced in West Germany.
The 311's motor was a three-cylinder, two-cycle engine of modest power that required a fairly light car. A marketing virtue of the 311 was that it did not look at all like a DKW or IFW L9.
Images below unless noted are of cars for sale and factory-sourced photos.
The 311 was a pleasant design in its original, sparsely-decorated form. Curved glass for the windshield and backlight window was imported from West Germany.
Details differ, but the fender shapes are similar. Also the downward slopes of the trunk lids when seen in profile.
Elaborate two-tone paint designs were fashionable in the USA in the mid-1950s, and a number of European car makers followed the fad, as can be seen here.
Fancy two-toning was passé in the USA by this time.
Wartburg 311s came in this form and station wagons as well as sedans. Strongly American-influenced styling. And a pretty bourgeois setting for a car from the proletarian East. Perhaps this publicity image was used to sell export cars.
The resemblance is even stronger to the '52 Studebaker which had vertically oriented tail lights.
ReplyDeleteOr the 1950 Studebaker, the first year of that Studebaker facelift with vertical tail lights.
ReplyDeleteYou can see influences of GM and Chrysler postwar designs in it also, all from about seven years earlier.