Let’s go back in time.
‘We’ve gone from main engine start, we have main engine start.”
This was the future of cars in 1981, and when the DeLorean DMC-12 began production with gull-wing
doors, gullwing as in gulls. Gullwing doors, doors in unpainted stainless steel panels,
because paint is for cars that could never convincingly play a time machine, the future
looked pretty great from every angle.
And then on October 19, 1982, that timeline ended.
I’ve got a spoiler: this is not a DeLorean.
So, like a lot of people, I first heard about the DeLorean from Back to the Future.
And this fictional version of the car was wildly popular.
But then you find out that the real DeLorean failed less than two years after production began.
How does that happen?
Somehow it is still such a popular car that DeLorean clubs meet around the world just
to talk about how great it is.
I have a green light.
The DeLorean story goes from Hill Valley in 1955, to Margaret Thatcher’s parliament,
to war-torn Belfast, Ireland, to a very rainy parking lot near Washington, DC.
That story goes a ton of places, even where I’m driving right now in this resoundingly
mediocre vehicle.
When you get into this story, it turns out that the DeLorean really is a time machine.
“Are you, are you in it right now?”
“I am in it right now, lemme see if I can flip the camera around.
Right?
I can do that, right?
This entire car is 100% original.
I like the DMC logo up there, that’s one thing that’s unique.
The door ajar light has the gull wing on it.”
“You have to brag about the gullwing door in the door ajar light.”
The DeLorean’s many quirks are a collection of design choices and manufacturing irregularities.
Legendary Italian designer Giorgetto Giugiaro created the design in 1974 and refined it
through 1978.
Early brainstorms for a mid-engine became a rear engine, and the stainless panels were
smoothed out a bit.
Lotus, via legendary racer and engineer Colin Chapman, provided the car’s
engineering.
The engine was a Renault V6.
The gullwing doors were in the legacy of cars like the Bricklin, a failed gullwing indie
car, as well as gullwings by Mercedes.
Those gullwing doors required unusual adaptations, like a cryogenically twisted torsion bar
and tiny windows - called tollbooth windows, because they were just large enough to pay
a toll.
But it actually wasn’t hard to get in and out of those gullwing doors.
“Anybody watching this can see it on my YouTube channel, it’s just Geek Therapy
Radio.
And the myth is that gullwing doors, you can’t park in any parking lot because if someone
parks too close to you, you’re trapped.
Doors, as you see, hinge in the roof.
So the doors go up more than they go out.”
“Rejoice!
Rejoice!”
DeLorean fans are always debating about the car’s quality.
If you say the engine is underpowered, they’ll say, well it wasn’t that underpowered for
cars of the time.
If you say it was heavy, they’ll say, ah well, look at these Porsches, they were actually
heavier or the same weight.
So the arguing?
It’s a rite of passage if you are a DeLorean owner.
“These guys are all awesome.”
“Rejoice!”
“Everytime I see someone post a picture of a DeLorean on Reddit, you go into the comments,
and it’s usually people posting misinformation, other people ragging on the car for whatever
reason, and then of course you get like one or two people, usually - sometimes me - who
then start attacking, going no, here’s the real history, and it’s like, we’re arguing
on the internet, who cares?”
“And it’s Reddit!”
“Right, and it’s Reddit.
You like the car, you don’t like the car you don’t like the car, BFD.”
So, whatever you think of the car, the DeLorean’s design was improbable.
But its creation?
That, that was almost impossible.
“I remember having a conversation with John once when we were walking around the plant.
I said to him, you know, what is it about the car, John, that is sacrosanct to you?
He said, well, there are three things: stainless steel, gullwing doors, rear engine.
You can do what you like with anything else.
My name’s Barrie Wills.
I was actually the first employee hired out of the UK car industry into DeLorean.
I’d read about John, of course.
He oozed charisma, he was charming, he was smart,
and above all, he demonstrated a thorough knowledge of the auto industry.”
We are here.
It’s a liquor store.
Cutty Sark Whiskey — the whiskey with a boat.
I have this whiskey because John Z. DeLorean and his car were used in this ad to help sell it.
He was that glamorous already.
John DeLorean was a superstar.
He started as an engineer.
This 1958 patent - one of many - was for a slip drive transmission that he designed.
But he found bigger roles.
In 1964, he was considered instrumental in creating the Pontiac GTO.
The car was young, and cool.
It remade Pontiac’s reputation and made a reputation for John DeLorean.
And by the 70s, he was in line to be President of General Motors.
Being President of GM at that time was like being next in line to be king.
Here’s a bump.
But DeLorean was chafing at it.
He thought it was too corrupt and he thought they were too square.
He was a celebrity and he was a rebel.
So he quit.
But he had stayed long enough to make a reputation for himself.
This is him in 1974, a year after he quit GM (critics, of course, said that he was fired).
Long hair, cool shirt, a new look.
He said he had surgery due to either an injury or a jawbone impact correction.
Critics said was a makeover, the same way he madeover Pontiac.
He also married his third wife, the internationally famous Cristina Ferrare, who he said he’d
literally first seen in the pages of Vogue.
He was the celebrity maverick who fired GM.
And that gave him the mystique to take them on.
Hope you’re enjoying that authentic turn signal sound.
I’ve actually composed a song for later in this video.
For when we hit our deepest emotional depth.
It’s a sad song.
I’m going to play it later.
The new DeLorean Motor Company had glamorous investors like The Tonight Show’s Johnny
Carson as well as a unique plan to get investments from car dealers.
“This is a presentation of the DeLorean Motor Company.
Our requirements are one: the dealer or his dealer associates must own $25,000 in DeLorean
motor company common stock.”
But a brand new factory and car required north of $100 million in investment.
That meant government cash.
There were a few potential timelines.
Early flirtations with a Saudi Arabian investor and the state of Pennsylvania fizzled.
A plan with Puerto Rico got further, offering a package close to $60 million if DeLorean
raised $25 million first (and spent it first).
But Northern Ireland, and therefore the UK, eventually paid up around $120 million, depending
how you split loans, grants, and guarantees.
The location of the factory?
It was difficult.
“It was 72 acres of...there were cattle on it.
Half a mountain had to be relocated from outside Belfast to put enough footings onto the site
to construct the buildings.
Put the steel framework up, apart from the fact that two streams had to be diverted.”
This was with an insanely fast 18 month time frame and an even more unstable political
environment.
All this was during “The Troubles,” the violent sectarian conflict in which Northern Ireland
was fighting over whether they should be part of the Republic of Ireland or the UK.
And this is why DeLorean got the money.
The British government wanted to add stability and jobs to a violent, unemployment-plagued
region.
Barrie Wills says that it actually didn’t impact production that much, but riots did
spill into the factory, and they had to consider stuff like hunger strikes
in their production timeline.
“As each hunger striker died, the Catholic, Republican workforce, would be called out
for a day of mourning.
The director of personnel was given a program by the Northern Ireland office of the likely
death days of the hunger strikers so that we could plan ahead.
Like, terrible.”
Any other company would have let off the gas in this situation, but DeLorean did not have
a choice.
They were shipping 1,800 cars in October of 1981.
They had to keep up with their funding obligations.
Hire a large workforce, pay bonuses, make royalty payments.
It was a lot.
They pulled it all off really quickly.
This DeLorean Motor Company infomercial shows the factory at work.
But they needed constant cash to keep this going - from car sales or the British government.
They needed perfection, but they got reality instead.
Though the company had turned a slight profit by some measures, there were also almost 5,000
unsold cars by January of 1982.
They were very pricey at $25,000, and they’d gotten a bad reputation.
A 2,000 car recall and performance issues in the first batch didn’t help.
“The first cars that were shipped out to the states were not good cars.
We were under immense pressure.
The government had made it clear that we weren’t going to get anymore money.”
By February, 1982, DMC was in receivership - basically a forced bankruptcy.
By May, production stopped.
DeLorean had dipped back for money before, and the UK, led by conservative Margaret Thatcher,
didn’t want to give more money to an American company.
Rumors of fishy corporate structures, credible accusations of fraud, and possible millions
in diverted money didn’t help make the sale.
So all that had to have made it harder to raise cash in those last ditch efforts.
Now DeLorean fans, they will tell you that the company failed because of the recession,
and bad weather, and exchange rates, and they have a really good point — all that stuff hurt
the company.
But it might not have doomed the company had it not taken on so much risk, again and again.
All those bets?
Eventually DeLorean was going to lose one of them.
And that was all before the flashiest scandal of all happened.
In autumn, DeLorean was arrested for trying to raise money in an unusual way - agreeing
to smuggle millions of dollars worth of cocaine.
“It was horrific.
I was told the night before that we all believed that John was raising the money.
We didn’t know where it was coming from.
I got a call hours before John’s arrest, to say, bring the workforce together tomorrow, I’m
sorry Barrie, it’s all over, it’s liquidation.”
DeLorean was eventually acquitted because of entrapment.
He was never convicted of smuggling or fraud.
So you have to make a judgment call.
When you see this man, do you see a genius?
Or an actor, playing a part?
Maybe he was both.
John Z. DeLorean, why did your car have to die?
But your dream lives on.
Let me show you why.
Alright, so if you don’t know what Big Lots is, it got its store as an overstock store.
Bargain bin place.
And when DeLorean went bankrupt, the parent company of Big Lots actually bought all the
DeLorean parts.
We’re talking like, the literal stainless steel panels.
And all those parts went into a warehouse.
It looked like the end of the DeLorean story.
And then a movie came out.
What is the comment you get over and over again?
“This is what makes time travel possible.”
“After the movie, it was all about the flux capacitor.”
“Flux capacitor.”
“Where’s the flux capacitor?
You know after a while you just get worn down and have to make a flux capacitor.”
“Flux capacitor.”
“Flux cap-” “McFly!
McFly or Back to the Future.
But usually it’s the McFly.”
The car in the movie?
It was a fantasy.
It had to go 88 miles to travel in time, and the original DeLorean speedometer doesn’t
go that high.
They had to modify it for the movie.
But little differences like that didn’t stop the DeLorean from becoming a time machine.
After the movie, two communities developed in the vacuum left by DeLorean Motor Company’s
failure.
Today, there’s a strong international roster of companies able to service DeLoreans and
supply factory original parts, even though they weren’t a part of the original company.
And there are also clubs around the world where owners can support each other.
“Right now I’m the president of the DeLorean Midatlantic club. We have about 80 members
in the club right now.
We do events 4 times a year.”
One of Tiffany’s first events was a DeLorean MidAtlantic pigrimage to John Z. DeLorean’s
mansion.
But club events aren’t just about the past.
They’ve made the car a platform for creativity.
It’s a stainless steel Lego set.
“Everybody has their level of modifications they like.
For my own car I’ve actually done custom reupholstered seats.
I’ve upgraded the exhaust to stainless steel exhaust that’s been from DeLorean Go in Europe.
It sounds great.”
“So at this point I’ve done fuel lines, the alternator, fuses and relays, radiator
fans, the entire suspension at this point’s been upgraded.
The car’s been lowered, new tires.”
“We will share parts with each other.
Like if someone’s working on something and we need something, I have extra DeLorean parts.
So it’s kinda neat knowing that you have part of your car in someone else’s, living
on.”
“I made it and did all the programming and developed all the software and put it in my car."
This runs everything on the car.
It gets data to the digital dash.
“I mean, as most owners will tell you it’s never over.
Well I of course had to upgrade that.
That’s Lightning McQueen.
He’s in for an overhaul.
I doubled the voltage on and that’ll be ready for the spring.”
There’s one clip in particular I really like.
It’s of the Tri-State DeLorean club and they’re taking a picture with all their
cars.
Now look at them, look at how they rush to get out of the way.
They are happy to give up the spotlight in a way that John Z. DeLorean never could.
This car succeeded because it inspired people.
Let’s end this video in the right car.
“Perfect.”
“All those people there, the thing that brings us together is this car, but they’re
all really great people and I consider them all friends.
It’s a good thing.
I’ve reached the point in my life now where I really have to choose where I’m going
to spend my time and the type of people I’m gonna be around.
You’ve got to be really careful where you spend your time.
You don’t want to waste it.”
So thank you for riding with me today.
If you want to check out a Cars and Coffee like the one I went to in the video, there
might be one in your area, and there’s a lot of cool cars that people share there.
Thank you also to the Tri-State DeLorean Club for letting me tag along.
They were all awesome and incredibly nice.
Thank you to Barrie Wills for sharing with me his stories.
They’re detailed further in his book about his career with DeLorean.
Finally, in our membership program the Video Lab, I am reviewing five or six of the top
DeLorean books which I read for this piece and letting you know which you should check
out and which ones you can go ahead and skip.