(first posted 10/23/2015) So much for Back to the Future Day, October 21, 2015. The Cubs certainly didn’t win the World Series this year, as I so painfully observed over the past few days with their shut-out versus the Mets. And of course we all know that the DeLorean in no way became a vehicle of the future. But the entertainment value lives on, and few things provide a more entertaining read to car enthusiasts than the introduction of an all-new car company. In 1981, Car and Driver and Motor Trend were eager to get their hands on the wonder car from John Z. Were any of their predictions correct? What did they actually think of the car? Read on!
In their May 1981 issue, Car and Driver offered a preliminary glimpse of the car, as well as interesting overviews both on John Z. DeLorean as well as how he assembled the funding for his dream.
So the dream aspect of the DeLorean–a new car from a new car company–was certainly compelling to the editors. If nothing else, it made for a great story. And, as befitting automotive journalists, they noted their eager anticipation in getting to wring out an actual unit for testing. A complete road test, coming soon…
Or maybe not. In a harbinger of things to come, no buff book got their hands on a car for a thorough test and detailed article in a timely manner. Cars just went directly to customers, as the DeLorean Company dodged and ducked and pushed their new babies into the market.
The next opportunity to read about an actual DeLorean on the road did finally come with the December 1981 issues. This time Motor Trend pitted the DeLorean against some of its rivals, both exotics like the Ferrari Mondial and Maserati Merak, along with more traditional sports cars like the Corvette and Porsche 928.
All in, the article was an interesting summation of the challenges and charms of the super car set circa 1981. As for predictions of the future, well it’s no surprise that DeLorean didn’t make it–the flaws were all too evident, no matter how desirable the dream. Though there was a bit of a correct glimpse into the future in the article–after all, the 928 did set the template for successful, front-engined Porsche models. No one, however, could have possibly imagined those best-selling Porsches of the future would be SUVs and misshapen sedans…
Ha ha – I’ve been waiting for the right moment and this is it.
Only ONE thing “sealed” the fate of the DeLorean: Wait for it…
SEALED WINDOWS!
No applause needed. Thank you very much.
How about price, or rather value versus the competition? John Z. initially stated that the car would cost $10-15k. Then when it got closer to sale, the price jumped to $25k. The second article says that the price “as tested” was almost $43k!! How much did a Corvette or even a Porsche cost in 1981-82?
BTW, there seems to be at least one page missing from the second article.
Of course all those things, but apparently, if I recall, they weren’t all that reliable, either.
A Dodge Colt could probably run rings around one – if not in speed, but in longevity!
Still, by themselves, I thought they were rather cool looking at the time.
Yeah, I was looking for the rest of the 2nd article too. There’s nothing of substance there.
Sorry about that, I’ve fixed the glitch. All the pages of the Motor Trend article are in place now.
Thanks!
1982 Corvette’s were under $20,000. A collector edition was about $23000, although options could push the price up on both.
The small window cut out does open.
The de Lorean was a flashy car. I don’t think you got much for the money though. The best part was probably the gull wing doors.
Gull wing doors are a great visual statement, but could they be any more impractical in today’s auto-jammed world. I realize this vehicle represents more fantasy than reality from another era, but how can it be taken anywhere it doesn’t have a parking ingress/egress strategy? If an exotic statement had to be made, like GM’s tailgate clamshell, a door that slid quietly into the chassis and window glass into the roof would have been a better approach, imho.
One problem with the gull wing doors on the de Lorean was how to get out if the doors would not open for some reason. But the doors only required a foot of clearance on either side of the car to open.
The M/T comparo article had a major layout goof, and had the specs summary for the Porsche and DeLorean swapped. Thus the wrong as-tested price (and everything else). (This reply for BigOldChryslers)
You win the prize!! When I was scanning in this article I noticed the price was wrong for the DeLorean but I didn’t pick up on the fact that EVERYTHING was swapped between the two cars. That is a MAJOR goof. Hard for Motor Trend to credibly critique the DeLorean when they can’t even print the car’s specs correctly!!
AHA!
I kept thinking that the specs’ listing of 200hp for the DeLorean seemed much higher than I remembered from back in the day. And then too, $25,000 for a 928 seemed low.
I should’ve looked closer at the layout and engine size, which is the dead giveaway.
Never knew that it had sealed windows! And I think the colored ones are cool, but the thing that makes a Delorean a Delorean is the stainless steel finish. Glad you don’t see any painted ones – it would have taken away from the coolness factor, IMHO.
Those who attended the CC Meetup last October in Auburn were able to see a red DeLorean. While obviously a DeLorean, it was indeed a blip off from what one would expect – sort of like seeing a black and white movie that has been lightly colorized. Not off-putting, just obviously different.
So cool Jason, I would like to see one in person. It would surely take me by surprise as I’ve never seen one in the flesh. When I was referring to painted ones I was referring to when they were new – I am glad the majority were stainless and have remained that way for collector reasons. When you hear Delorean, of course you think stainless gull-wing “Back to the Future” sports car.
Today I see the DeLorean as sort of cool and oh so ’80s.
At the time it came out, I wasn’t buying into the hoopla, I was too busy smarting over the horrendous things that were happening to virtually all American cars as the first wave of downsizing was wrapping up and the second wave was on the horizon.
At the time, the DeLorean was to me just another impotent, goofily styled pile of CAFE compliance that was being foisted upon us as with the expectation that we should be excited. To no small degree, that was part of the underlying mirth of using the DeLorean in the BTTF series.
The line that brought at lot of grins at the movie house with people thinking of so many different things…..
https://youtu.be/2sLnnjHjDgE
One of the all-time great stories of how a million little political/economical/engineering compromises turned an A+ concept into a C- reality (but fortunately still with A+ styling). Aaron Severson’s Ate Up With Motor write-up is a must-read: (http://ateupwithmotor.com/model-histories/delorean-dmc-12-history/).
For example: It was supposed to be mid-engined, like the cars it was here pitted against, but since the FWD PRV V6 was selected to save on development and environmental certification costs, it had to be rear-engined (or else everything would spin the wrong way). So, it ended up with a 62% rear weight bias. D’oh!
That doesn’t make any sense. Since the Renault drive train had the engine in front of the axle line, and the transmission behind it, mounting it in reverse, as was actually done, meant that it would have run backwards, so they obviously flipped the ring gear in the final drive to make it work.
So that certainly doesn’t explain why the engine was put in the rear. I’ve asked AUWM why he wrote that, since it’s not logical.
There must have been other reasons.
This Road and Track (link) discusses the change to rear engine. Primary reason is to make the engine easier to maintain as well as increase passenger space.
Vanity project through and through.
The colored DeLoreans remind me of Easter eggs you colored when you were a kid, that is a tint but not a true “color change”. It may just be the pictures, the colors pictured here look like they could be washed off in a heavy rain. I think a good metallic color like gold would work, though.
You have to admit one thing that Delorean got right – he nailed the preferred kitchen appliance finish decades before it became popular!
That’s probably because they’re doctored photos, not actual prototypes. If anodizing the panels was practical that would make a durable surface that would still look very different from painted mild steel.
Yes, one has to question Doc’s judgement in building a time machine…you can’t do anything about the past, but wouldn’t you want to base your time machine on something you’d be reasonably able to get parts for? I know you had to achieve 88.8 miles per hour or something along that range (been awhile since I last saw the movie, probably close to 30 years) but wouldn’t a small block chevy motor like in a Corvette have been a better place for your “flux capacitor” (as an engineer I get a chuckle over that one) if you wanted to be able to get parts for it in the future? It seemed like the DeLorean was always crashing into something when I arrived at a certain time (how could you predict what structures would be in place in the future?) so as a moving object you’d want to make sure you could get replacement parts as well as the nuclear fuel needed. Maybe he thought the PRV engine would have taken off in sales on some model (maybe Volvo, maybe Peugeot?) but still not likely common in the future…perhaps we’ll all be driving electric cars by then (or maybe self driving cars will be illegal by then ).
I can just see it, you’ve finally located the nuclear material, but then you’ve blown a head gasket (got to keep your cooling system in good shape especially if you are dealing with nuclear material!) so you can’t get to 88 mph (maybe you have to push it off a cliff?)
If you watch the movie “Buckaroo Banzai”, they use a VERY similar looking device (to the flux capacitor) when BB opens a portal into another dimension…..this time it’s the 8th dimension, if I remember correctly. I think the “device” even sits in about the same spot in both vehicles.
I wonder if Doc chose the DeLorean because he thought it looked futuristic or perhaps (as a lover of that very rare Packard convertible,) he was looking for something oddball and/or cheap?
BTW, I agree with your premise that a time machine might be better built with commonly available parts, but with the ever increasing speed of obsolescence you might only be “safe” if going backwards in time.
In the first movie Doc explains he chose it for both style and the stainless steel exterior helps it do *something* and was cut off by the terrorists showing up.
Well, Marty did have trouble starting it in 1955 and almost missed the lighting strike that powered it back into the future. Thankfully, things still worked out.
Flux Capacitor is a spoof of a real device called a Ring Laser Gyro.
What I question even more is most of the time travel mechanism is directly on top of the engine, and it all seems pretty permanently attached, at least that’s how it seems to be portrayed. It seems like just topping off the oil would be problematic, let alone a big issue preventing a trip.
Then again, this is thinking inside the constraints of the 1985 version of it before it’s first trip. When Doc came back FROM the future at the end of the first movie, clearly several alterations were made and adapted, the hover conversion and the Mr. Fusion – which, does it fuel the time circuits(in lieu of plutonium, which it seemed to consume 1 rod of per trip in the first) or does it fuel the engine(in lieu of fossil fuel)? If the latter whose to even say the PRV was even in there anymore? In order for the wheels to articulate as they did in order to hover, the driveline at the very least would be very much altered, as same with suspension. The time machine very much seemed to be a working project in the movies, what we saw in them was the exciting adventure, what we didn’t see was the minutia. In the trip(s) Doc took the Delorian on after dropping Marty off at his house and picking him up to go to 2015 the next morning, he could have been away for months, years even, in that span, with plenty of time to iron out the wrinkles of the initial build.
Mr. Fusion only powered the Flux Capacitor. This was explained in 3 after an arrow pierced the fuel line causing all the gas to leak out. That’s why they needed the train to push it.
Parts aren’t much of an issue as DMC in Houston has all of the original engineering drawings and some of the tooling….not to mention a huge stash of the original leftover parts from Belfast.
Mr. Fusion OTOH…..
I remember when I first heard of the DeLorean. I saw photos of the car in Car and Driver, Road and Track, and Motor Trend. I remember being impressed with everything about the car, except its chassis. There’s nothing wrong with the X frame, but I believe it should’ve been reinforced on the outer side of the car, or added rigidity, and for safety.
That chassis was not the problem – it is essentially a Lotus Esprit or Elite/Eclat engineered for the rear-engined configuration, which was to me one of the (many) flaws that car had. In fact, that the DeLorean was not early Corvair (or Porsche 911) dangerous is probably because of the work Lotus did on the chassis…
It is pretty revealing that the first drive of the Cavalier didn’t merit a cover. GM did so much damage to itself with the X-cars that their new products no longer dominated the automotive media. It’s also pretty sad to read this Motor Trend review in light of today’s car magazines. This is MOTOR TREND, the perennial weak sister of US auto magazines, and their deep dive into the DeLorean is more comprehensive than anything you will find from any automotive magazine on any subject of any significance whatsoever. Are people too stilted to read long articles? Is there not enough you can say about a car without compromising the interests of your advertisers? Are they too busy posting photos of their handbag dogs on social media?
C/D had just featured the GM J bodies as the main cover story the previous month.
The C/D and MT DeLorean articles were both well written, with the MT one being much better than their typical writeups from that time.
I’m surprised how kind Motor Trend was to it. Seems as though it was a fairly likable car despite its rather glaring faults. Not first-class by any means, but better than I expected. I guess it’s important to keep things in perspective with the times.
Here’s the real question about the Delorean: could he have gotten the price down to something substantially more realistic relative to its actual performance, if it had been built sans the stainless-steel body and gull-wing doors? That body and doors were the two things that Delorean absolutely insisted must stay as the car went through development. He knew it had to have something special, even if the rest of the car was not. It was a flawed, short-term strategy, much like the man himself.
The bottom line is that starting a car company from the ground up is damn-near impossible. Most recently, the Fisker quickly came and went, and Elon Musk and his Tesla, despite beating all the long odds, has done amazingly well, but is still constantly struggling every day, even now.
Yeah, Consumer Reports withdrawing their Tesla recommendation this past week due to poor reliability isn’t going to help.
Exactly. You have to wonder what the difference might be between guys like Bricklin, Delorean, and Fisker, and Elon Musk. Surely, it’s not just luck that Musk has done far better than the other three.
Ironically, Michael J. Fox had a Fisker. Don’t think it’s worth very much now, though.
Musk perfected crony capitalism. He had cheap Department of Energy funding. He gets paid by real car companies to build his loss-leader toys for the rich under the carbon trading scam and ‘zero emissions’ fantasies. He has a factory that has been a UAW stronghold forever, making it left wing politicians’ job to keep the doors open. Forbes had an interesting article on how much money ordinary consumers would save if Tesla would stop building cars.
The Dept. of Energy loans were paid off a long time ago, and were not a significant part of Tesla’s overall funding. In fact, Musk paid them back early because he didn’t need them.
The EV credits that Tesla sells to other carmakers don’t cost taxpayers anything. If Tesla weren’t around to utilize them and sell them, the carmakers would have to actually build EVs, instead of buying the credits. That would undoubtedly cost them much more.
There was no political intervention in the factory. It had closed, and was possibly going to be razed. Toyota entered a partnership with tesla, and eventually sold the plant to Tesla. The employees are not UAW.
I understand lots of folks hate Tesla. Yes, they have taken advantage of credits that were already in place, which someone else might have taken instead. But Tesla’s financing is not dependent on tax-payer support. Their stock price makes that quite clear.
Tesla’s sales are dependent on taxpayer support. Rich people buying loss-leader cars that are subsidized by middle class car purchases already get tax breaks for doing so. That’s why the hate.
You can keep saying/believing that (like so many Tesla haters), but you haven’t shown how that’s true. Repeating it it doesn’t make it true.
As I said before, Tesla selling tax credits helps them, but is not essential to them. And if Tesla weren’t selling the tax credits, auto makers would have to either buy them from someone else or actually build EVs at a cost substantially greater than buying the credits.
If you want to blame someone, blame CA for the EV requirements, but not Tesla for doing the obvious: taking advantage of them. They’d be nuts not to.
Anyway, the EV credits will likely end before long, and Tesla’s future is not dependent on them.
Never mind the facts; just keep on hating….it’s just how conservative politics works.
Saying that taking advantage of unjust laws is a blameless act obviates morality, which is nothing I feel obligated to accept.
The basic problem was that the business plan required sales to run around 1000 per month (12000 annual) while in reality sales were half that. Had John de Lorean started out smaller, say about 150 sales per month, he might have gotten financing in the USA, and got the business going sooner. I think he expected to be serious competition for Corvette sales.
While a more conventional design would have been less expensive to build, sales would probably have been less too. Without the flashy style, there is little to make the de Lorean a good value.
Those Porsche 928 specifications read a lot like the DeLorean’s…
And vice versa…
I always wondered what John DeLorean thought of the Fiero.
He was an engineer, why didn’t he design the whole car himself instead of hiring Lotus? Most likely it was cheaper to do it that way.
I said it before and will say it again: the project was doomed from the start and any reasonable person – particularly someone with John Z’s credentials – should have known that at the feasibility study stage. I have to assume he was either consumed by his hate of GM or had some other personal issues, drug-related or otherwise.
I wonder if John Z had used a Buick Turbo V6 (he must have had at least a couple of friends at GM) or even a Cross Fire 350 would the DeLorean have been a more successful sports car?
To be successful they needed to double sales volume. Better performance would have helped to some extent, but not likely enough to change the outcome.
I got to run..
I think two got sold in my home town; Delorean’s that it. Their best trick was being able to drive under the parking barriers and avoid the expensive hourly charges.
Well, you can take the guy out of GM but you can’t take the GM out of the guy, I guess.
For even more inside dirt read “Dream Maker The Rise and Fall Of John Delorean”. Such hubris for one man. Unless it was Charles Keating or Ken Lay.
“I’m going to build an ethical automobile”. Right.
Back in the early 80’s, I would frequently see one parked on North Paulina Street in Chicago. Near where I lived at the time, very low and not practical for the city. Real swoopy though. Quite a treat to see it so often.