Thursday, September 16, 2021

Wartburg 311 and 312

Today's subject comes from the East German Wartburg carmaker.  It's the Wartburg 311/312 (Wikipedia entry here) produced 1956-1965.

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.

Gallery

1956 Wartburg 311 walkaround - Lloyds Auctions 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.

The six-window passenger compartment looks light and airy.

The previous image and the rear quarter view are suggestive of another car.

Another rear quarter view, this of a 1963 Wartburg 311.  Compare it to ...

1947 Studebaker Champion
Details differ, but the fender shapes are similar.  Also the downward slopes of the trunk lids when seen in profile.

1957 Wartburg two-tone paint schemes
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.

A variation of the previous scheme.

Perhaps a 1966 Wartburg 312 export model
Fancy two-toning was passé in the USA by this time.

1964c Wartburg 311 hardtop coupé
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. 

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

The resemblance is even stronger to the '52 Studebaker which had vertically oriented tail lights.

emjayay said...

Or the 1950 Studebaker, the first year of that Studebaker facelift with vertical tail lights.

You can see influences of GM and Chrysler postwar designs in it also, all from about seven years earlier.