The Trabant car produced in Eastern Germany was the most popular automobile during the time of the Eastern Bloc. Around the time the Berlin Wall fell, Trabants became a symbol of the German Democratic Republic, as images of Eastern Germans driving them into Berlin and other parts of West Germany were broadcast worldwide. The car was awfully built and unreliable, particularly notable was its shell constructed from duroplast, a kind of fibre glass. This meant that Trabant car crashes sounded like no other road accidents, not metal scratching over metal but the sharp cracking of plastic.