- [James] Fyre Festival.
It was supposed to be the pinnacle of opulence,
decadence, and hedonism but everything imploded
and it became a big fat joke.
And that's kind of what happened with DeLorean as a company.
This car in particular,
this 24 karat gold-plated DeLorean,
which was designed as the ultimate 80s symbol
of luxury, wealth, and success,
is the biggest failure in the history of DeLorean.
Today, we are going bumper to bumper
on this factory 24-karate gold-plated DeLorean DMC-12.
(rock music)
We've had some amazing cars on this show
but this, this is the rarest car that we've ever featured.
It is a 1981 DeLorean DMC-12.
Now, they only made like 9,000 DMC-12s
but this one is very special.
It's one of only three in the world
that's covered in genuine 24 karat gold-plating
straight from the factory.
It's the perfect metaphor to describe John DeLorean
and how he ran his business.
On the outside, it's a shiny attention-grabbing future car,
but on the inside, it's underpowered
and ready to break down at any moment.
The thing is, everything should've worked out for DeLorean.
He knew how to run a company.
He knew how to make a great car.
He had a great idea to build
the world's first ethical sports car.
A safe, fuel efficient, and long-lasting alternative
to the gas-guzzling sports cars of the time.
So how did we end up with this?
(electronic music)
When John DeLorean worked at GM, he was a dynamo.
DeLorean designed the Pontiac GTO, the Firebird,
and the Grand Prix as well as the Chevy Cosworth Vega.
DeLorean commissioned famous Italian designer,
Giorgetto Giugiaro to draw up the plans in the 70s.
This dude designed everything
from Fiats to Saabs to my favorite, Volkswagen.
Literally hundreds of cars.
He designed the MK1 Golf and the MK1 Scirocco
so naturally, I wish he was my grandpa.
Si Papa.
John DeLorean built his career in Detroit as a young man.
When he left Pontiac in 1973 to start
DeLorean Motor Company, he was the youngest division head
in GM's history.
He did what any fast track exec having a mid-life crisis
would do, he divorced his wife, got plastic surgery
to enhance his jawline, and started dating models.
Hell yeah.
This car was tailor-made for coked up yuppies.
It was a cross-promotion for the American Express Gold Card
and it was featured in their 1980 Christmas catalog.
Available exclusively to Gold Card Members.
This thing could be bought for $85,000.
Which is about $250,000 today
To put that in context, in 1980, you could buy a brand new
Ferrari 305 that performed way better
than this for around $55,000.
American Express had planned on selling a hundred of these.
Seven were ordered but only three were finished before
the plant shut down.
There's this one, which sat in a bank in Texas for 20 years.
It has nine and a half miles on the odometer.
And it's never been driven.
There's another one that was bought by a dude
up in Northern California who decided that he was gonna
drive his but he dented the door the first time
he took it out.
His insurance had to pay $14,000 to replace it
because it couldn't just be buffed out.
That dude gave it away after his insurance payments
went up to $1,000 a month.
The third gold-plated DeLorean was up for sale
by a private owner and it's unclear whether or not
it's been sold.
The asking price was $250,000.
I mean Will.i.am probably bought it,
but no one will ever know.
Unlike Nolan's heart, the body isn't made of solid gold.
The body is actually 24 karat gold sheet on top
of stainless steel.
If you scraped off all the gold from this car,
it wouldn't even fill your hand.
It's less than an ounce.
The steel plates are attached
to a fiberglass monocoque underbody.
This wasn't the original concept though.
DeLorean had planned to use urethane foam and fiberglass
for the underbody in a process
called elastic reservoir molding or ERM.
Or ERM.
The benefit of this method was extreme crash resistance
with impact being spread over the entire panel.
It was a smart idea but in the end,
they ditched the method for a more conventional
and cheaper fiberglass underbody.
DeLorean actually bought the rights to ERM process
before it was proven for some reason.
It was just one of the dumber moves in a string
of dumb moves that would describe the DMC legacy.
Luckily, DeLorean made a couple of smart moves too.
One of them was enlisting the minds over at Lotus
to look over the earlier, heavily flawed designs
of the DMC-12.
Lotus helped with the design.
They added larger rear tires and helped fortify
safety features in the DMC-12.
Without the help of Lotus, the DMC-12 might have been
much worse than it was.
The chassis was completely redesigned by Lotus.
It's a steel double y frame chassis that's shared
with the Lotus Esprit.
Obviously, one of the most iconic features
of the DeLorean are its gull wing doors.
They open straight up like how a seagull
gets into their car.
That's how they got their name, true story.
Now would be a good time to mention that I have to wear
gloves to open this door.
I'm only allowed to touch certain parts of this car.
The main differences between the normal stainless exterior
and this gold-plated exterior are that fingerprints
are super hard to wipe away on this one.
And big bros got warrants.
(seagull caws)
One common misconception is that these doors
require a larger clearance to open,
making them useless for cramped parking lots
but that's actually not true.
They only require 11 inches of clearance to fully open
which is less than a normal car needs to open.
So, eff you haters.
One thing that's pretty cool is that even the inside
of the door is gold-plated.
And they used gold screws on the door panels.
Nice attention to detail, in my humble opinion.
Despite some small victories, the DMC-12 was still
a huge failure, whether it's covered in gold or not.
To understand how broken DeLorean's system was,
you have to understand the circumstances
in which it was built.
The original DMC-12s were made in a factory
in Dunmurry, Northern Ireland, a suburb of Belfast.
If you don't know, Northern Ireland in the early 80s
was at the epicenter of a bloody conflict
between Loyalists, who wanted Northern Ireland
to remain part of the UK,
and Nationalists aka the IRA, who wanted it to be part
of Ireland proper.
Listen to "Sunday Bloody Sunday" by U2
to learn all about it.
Long story short, it wasn't the ideal situation
for a blooming new car company.
The location of the factory had an adverse effect
on DeLorean's price model.
The DMC-12 was named that because DeLorean
wanted to sell them for $12,000 but the added cost
of shipping them across the Atlantic meant
that if they wanted to make any profit the cars
needed to be sold for $25,000.
You could get a Corvette for $16,000 at the time.
So DeLorean was already facing an uphill battle
from the moment they entered the market.
And let me tell you, I wouldn't want to be stuck
in a DeLorean going uphill.
You see, this sports car's engine only makes about
a 130 hrsprs, let's take a look.
Which is what I would say if I were allowed
to open this hood.
So I'm going to rely on the talents of my editor Max
to make it look like I am opening the hood
and we're putting the engine right there.
Whoa.
This
(eye wink noises)
is a 2.85 liter V6 PRV engine.
PRV stands for Peugeot Renault Volvo.
It wasn't DeLorean's first choice for an engine.
It wasn't even his second choice.
He originally wanted to put
a 200 hrsprs Citroen sourced rotary
into the DMC-12 but that idea got scrapped.
The first prototype had a four cylinder Citroen,
then a Ford V6 and eventually they landed
on this leaky PRV.
It has a top speed of 110 miles per hour,
it can do 0 to 60 in, get ready for it.
Hold onto your seat, let me know in the comments
if you're ready, hit the subscribe button.
You ready?
You sure?
0 to 60 in 10.5 seconds.
The boys over at DMC ran into a big problem
when they switched to the PRV.
The initial rotary took up a lot less room
so they had to move it back and then it went from being
a mid-engine car to a rear-engine car
and that shifted the weight, causing massive problems
with the handling.
That was not their only problem, however.
The build quality of the DMC-12 was shotty from the get go.
Inexperienced workers needed to be trained quickly
and immediately production schedules were delayed.
Even by the time the factory was on schedule in 1982,
they weren't producing enough cars to cover
the manufacturing overhead.
DeLorean was sinking.
He needed to find investment capital quick.
And on October 19th 1982,
John DeLorean was busted by the FBI in a sting operation
for bankrolling the transport of 59 pounds of blow.
(upbeat electronic music)
- [Reporter] Federal authorities have finally arrested
him earlier this week.
- [James] A week later, the British government
pulled the plug on the DeLorean factory
and laid off 2500 workers.
Now a lot of people say he was framed.
I might be one of those people.
The big three don't want to see a little guy come up.
Why do you think Elon Musk is running into so much trouble?
Let's take a look at the interior.
(electronic music)
This is the only gold DeLorean that has black leather.
The other two have brown leather.
So that's pretty exciting.
I would love to touch this but alas,
the Peterson will not let me sit in this car,
but if I could, I wouldn't have a problem fitting.
John DeLorean was six foot four and wanted to make sure
that he and the rest of us big boys could sit in his car
without having to hunch over.
If you're short, it's a little harder
to yank to doors close so there's this loop
that you can pull.
It's like a subway loop.
All you JDM boys love it.
The seats look comfortable.
Wouldn't know, can't sit in it.
They're tastefully bolstered and the leather
looks nice and soft.
It's really crazy looking at a car this old
with carpet this nice.
I don't think I ever owned a car with carpet this nice.
The gauge cluster is pretty basic but there is one
pretty cool thing about it.
The door ajar light has gull wing doors
instead of conventional doors.
And that's about all I can say from this distance.
This gold covered car is the most DeLorean thing ever.
The dude was really smart and was driven to make
the coolest car possible.
But you can't produce a car off of pure determination.
There's so much that goes into making a great car
that DeLorean skipped over because of his ego
or because of mismanagement.
Who knows?
A few different decisions or if the cards fell
in a different way here and there.
We could have been driving new DeLorean models today.
If only Elon Musk had been born 30 years earlier.
Thank you so much to the Peterson Museum.
You like this car, you want to see more cars like this,
go to the Peterson.
Information is in the description.
They're a huge, huge friend of Donut.
We couldn't do a lot of this stuff without their support.
Thanks for watching Donut Media.
If you guys didn't watch it, then we wouldn't get
to make it.
We got a ton of new shows coming out this summer.
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hit that subscribe button right down there.
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If you want to learn more about DeLorean,
check out this episode of my other show, "Up To Speed."
It's all about the history of cars.
I love you.
(laughs)