citySTROMer #39 aus Lettland

Hello everyone!

I'm going to write here in English, because my German isn't that good yet. I will share to You my citySTROMer story, which is just began.

In February I got myself an citySTROMer. It has been abandoned for 15 years. Last owner told me that the car was taken to Latvia by some car salesman in 1997 and the car was used until batteries died. Batteries were way too expensive to change, so the car was just left by the corner. The best part is that all citySTROMer specific parts was still in place.

On the way home

And some pictures right after getting it home:

Everyone was excited about the looks of the car, so we participated in an exhibition

And then it was exhibited for a while at local dealer

When I got it back, I could finally start some work on the car. The first thing I had to do was renewing the registration of the car. Lucky there was an registration entry left in the system from 1997. and it took only few weeks to get new papers.

And the next job was to clean it.

The body has only few rust spots, where the paint had been damaged but no holes, so no welding will be required. The car itself is in very good condition, never had a crash and really looks like 44 000km car, except the interior, that has been already "upgraded" 15 years ago.

Then I started to work on electronics. Thanks to some other citySTROMer owners I got some documentation and after few months of not understanding nothing, some things started to become clearer and later this happened:

At first it was hard to understand how to drive it, but then after few laps around territory it ran pretty nice and then my battery collection in the trunk became empty.

Since that progress I have been very busy with other things, so the citySTROMer sits and waits for more progress on it.

At the moment charger is dead and also there may be a problem with fan and E-bremse works all the time, independent from the switch position.

My current plans on the car is to get all the electronics 100% working and then disassemble it and restore to factory original condition. When it will hit the roads, nobody can tell. There is a lot to do.

Thank You for good wishes!
For testing purposes I am using some old but still alive standard car batteries (8x12V). I also have 6 of the original batteries, but after 15 years of standing empty, they all are completely dead. It was very hard to take them out, because they expanded so that even the cases of batteries are torn apart. My plans are to restore the car to factory original condition, so I am planning to use same type lead-acid gel 6V batteries.

This is the only one citySTROMer of any generation known around here. There are some 1991. year models in Sweden, because they were also sold there. Currently there are known about 5 citySTROMers like this one (1985. year model) in the world left. And this is the only one outside of Germany.

All together there were made 50 cars like this one in 1985. and only one of them were sold to private owner. There are also Mk1 citySTROMers. 25 were made and if I remember correctly, 2 are still alive in Germany.