An admission: At first I was really pumped to have found a DeLorean parked at the curb – and on a cold December night, no less. Yet after some initial thought this pumped feeling transitioned into something that looked and felt like it may have originated from within the realm of ambivalence.
For a brand that produced just under 8,600 cars from 1981 to 1983, it isn’t difficult to find a DeLorean on static display; however, seeing one on the street is obviously an irregular occurrence. We’ve covered DeLorean related topics before (linked below); perhaps that was part of my ambivalent mindset.
After this initial ambivalence subsided, my thoughts on this DeLorean have ran the gamut since I began compiling them in late December. Like the ball on a roulette wheel, these multiple ideas seem to have finally settled into a reasonably happy resting place.
Discovering this DeLorean was the highlight of an already good and memorable evening, despite its unsavory cause. Mrs. Jason was in St. Louis for a family emergency so I had fired up my four-wheel drive Ford crew cab pickup to transport our teenage daughter a half-hour north to the city of Columbia for a meeting of the sewing guild in which she is president (with all other members being roughly 60 and over).
The hostess’s house was a fantastic 1940s era bungalow. Her living room, where I camped out, had a huge selection of vinyl records in a record store type display along one wall. The hundreds of records she had were categorized by genre, with nearly all one can imagine being represented. She had compiled a terrific playlist for the meeting.
I then spent the next two hours listening to jazz while reading a newspaper she had offered me – the prior Sunday’s edition of a paper named for the city that was named after the state. For the hand I’d been dealt, it was reasonably promising.
It had been a while since I’d perused a print copy of this publication. The articles covered the spectrum with my favorites being in the travel section. Throughout the entire paper some articles were riveting and some were space filler, not unlike the flip side of some old 45 rpm records.
Don’t get me wrong; I enjoyed the paper and reading it easily filled two hours. The variety of content was delightfully vast.
These two examples of variety are in stark contrast to the DeLorean. Variety wasn’t the DeLorean’s purpose in life; all were built with very little variety as the only option was an automatic transmission and the buyer was given a choice of a gray or black interior. Otherwise, the production run was quite homogenous.
The DeLorean Motor Company made few physical changes during their production run. The primary differences are in the hood area. The 1981 models had the gas door located on the hood as seen here.
That was gone for 1982 and a “DeLorean” badge could now be found above the left headlights. The final year 1983 models, of which there are few, had the VIN tag at the base of the windshield pasted down instead of being bolted as in 1982. Otherwise, all DeLoreans are near clones of each other.
Perusing online reveals a limited number of DeLoreans that have had their stainless steel exterior painted. The contents of various websites reveal there is considerable debate about whether or not the paint job was applied at the factory in Ireland. The evidence of this being the case is shaky and information from a DeLorean source says they were not. Yes, some were indeed painted but this was performed by dealers or, as was done for three early production cars, a subcontractor.
A paint booth in the factory would have been a significant investment for so few having been painted. Let’s also not forget it’s been thirty-six years since the last DeLorean was manufactured and a lot of details can be forgotten along with myths being created.
As an aside, there was a red DeLorean at the National Automobile and Truck Museum in Auburn, Indiana, which was seen by the CC Contingent at our 2014 Meet-up.
Recently a friend posted a social media comment about being an empathetic person. From the tone of their comment it appeared their empathetic streak may have been a personal source of concern. My unsolicited recommendation was for them to embrace their gift but to be very careful about not letting themselves get sucked into any drama. I carefully cautioned I’ve seen it happen to highly empathetic people many times.
Drama is something that almost drips from the DeLorean, along with its progenitor, like a leaky power steering pump. Has there been any car in the last half century overshadowed with as much drama, drama that is nearly impossible to avoid in any conversation about it? If one is inclined to think of Tesla or Elon Musk, either pales in comparison. Everything about the creation of the DeLorean is permeated with drama.
Suffering from what appeared to be a mid-life crisis run amok, John Z. DeLorean adopted a free-wheeling, playboy lifestyle that undoubtedly contributed to the termination of his wildly successful career at GM. The number of patents DeLorean held has been claimed to be as high as 200, although a definitive number is hard to pinpoint.
After his departure, he would spend the rest of his life in various endeavors, none meeting with the degree of success he had realized at General Motors.
His most successful post-GM endeavor, the creation of his automobile manufacturing company, would see DeLorean blowing through money sourced from the British government for the development of the car. While the car was being developed, this British money was also used on elaborate offices in high rent areas, interior decorators, and psychics among other things.
A faerie tree was located on ground earmarked for the DeLorean factory, causing a delay in building construction. Irish folklore maintained the destruction of any faerie tree would result in failure; this particular tree disappeared mysteriously one night.
The religious and political unrest in Northern Ireland caused further delays in construction of the factory. An agreement among the various parties led to a factory having two entry doors, one each for Catholics and Protestants, as well as an equal number of each on the payroll.
Let us not forget the wild distraction of DeLorean’s indictment for drug trafficking. While he was later acquitted, the damage had been done.
Even DeLorean’s childhood had a certain drama. In one account about DeLorean, it revealed his father was a factory worker at Ford Motor Company during the height of Henry’s $5 per day pay plan. It seems Henry had many moral and lifestyle stipulations on his $5, stipulations employees had to demonstrate to maintain this rate of pay. Further, Ford had no qualms about enforcing and inflicting his position.
Young John Z routinely witnessed Ford’s thugs come to his family’s home to inquire about the amount of money being saved, the amount of debt the family had, and their scouring the place for any tools that may have come from the Ford factory.
Any perceived violations would have resulted in the loss of this pay rate.
One method of interviewing for employment is to determine past actions to gain insight into future behaviors. However, it can also be argued actions are influenced by early experiences; at any rate it seems as if DeLorean, the son of a Romanian father and an Austrian mother, both immigrants to the United States, was forcefully determined to never endure any such indignities.
The drama of DeLorean’s phenomenally successful life can easily cause one to become distracted if thinking of any of these events and asking “what if that didn’t happen?”.
As stated earlier, my thoughts on this DeLorean have been many and varied. This last thought makes me think it would have been advantageous to have included the DeLorean in a long ago CC. That particular article was about a red 1959 Plymouth and my expounding upon how any red Forward Look Plymouth often tends to have a certain female name thrown at it, a name used for both a book and the movie it inspired.
The DeLorean, like the Plymouth, has also been hijacked, to a certain extent, by popular culture. The predictable statements about flux capacitors and reaching eighty-eight miles per hour are as inevitable as death and taxes. That a movie from nearly thirty-five years ago is still so pervasive in the public conscience is a feat not frequently duplicated.
The DeLorean has enjoyed enough association with the movie to remain relevant in the public conscience. Would this have happened without the movie? Likely not.
While the number no doubt fluctuates, there have been at least eighty-seven DeLoreans known to have been converted into clones of the three DeLoreans used in the production of the first film of that particular trilogy. In the late 1980s I saw a DeLorean at a now defunct car museum in Nashville, Tennessee, that was claimed to have been one of the three used in that particular film; it was powered by, if memory serves, a Ford 351 cubic inch V8.
All I can posit from any firsthand DeLorean experience is they are highly comfortable.
I have also learned seeing DeLoreans parked at the curb is an international thing. Will Stopford found this DeLorean in Australia. It appears this particular one is not one of the sixteen built as right-hand drive at the factory.
Writing this has proven to be cathartic as I no longer contain any ambivalence about having found a DeLorean. Despite the distractions of drama and celluloid, this is simply a rare old car that someone enjoys enough to use for its intended purpose of driving. The owner gets it and I’m happy to have found it.
Found December 20, 2018, in Columbia, Missouri
Other DeLorean CC Features:
Vintage Review by GN
A Daily Driven DeLorean by Mike George
JZD and The Birth of the DeLorean by Don Andreina
Back to the Future made it impossible to be ambivalent about this car.
Incredible find, and great article and pictures!! How lucky that you got to be photographed in this one.
I had to pause when I got to the part about his father, Henry Ford and the auditing of the family savings. No. Way.. Two things on that: if my current employer ever once did that s*** to me… (I won’t finish this one). Also, given the DeLorean family’s Ford-imposed restrictions on spending, it is no wonder John Z. went buck wild later.
I don’t think so. Times were tough and Ford’s $5/day pay rate was a considerable sum at the time. It meant the difference between their family eating or starving, employees really had little choice than to live with Ford’s Draconian measures. Of course, Ford (and the rest of the auto industry) would later pay a heavy price for those sorts of heavy-handed actions with the rise of the powerful UAW.
One of the more amusing footnotes to Ford’s reign of terror on his employees was how his favorite henchman tasked with carrying out his brutal wishes, Harry Bennett, thought he’d be a shoo-in to run the company when Henry finally became unable to do so. Instead, he was quickly cashiered by Henry Ford II.
Henry Ford thought he was doing his employees a favor. People talk about “the Nanny State” today with government intervention into our lives, but Henry Ford sort of had the same concept but in private industry back then. He really believed that if he could teach those poor stupid people the virtues of hard work, thrift and clean living that he had learned growing up on the farm, everyone would be so much better off.
Of course, then as now, most Americans don’t like others nosing into their business.
Thank you.
One teeny-weeny clarification is in order….the one I’m sitting in is one of the DeLoreans on static display. It’s at the Auto World Museum in Fulton, MO; Eric703 and I visited it some time back. The door was open and I stepped on in.
I caught one being self-motivated back in 2013:
https://www.curbsideclassic.com/blog/cc-outtake/road-trip-outtake-1981-83-delorean-dmc-12-forward-into-the-past/
Love it! What a great find. And an evening of being left alone listening to some jazz and reading a decent newspaper – this is as close to a perfect evening as you can get, especially when a cool car sighting follows it up.
My favorite thing about these is that stainless steel skin. What a great look it gives these. As for the car itself, I like the styling pretty well (more the outside than the inside which has that awful plasticky 80s look about it) the both dull and fragile drivetrain ruin the car for me. A decent V8 with a solid 5 speed stick would solve a lot of this car’s problems for me.
The BTTF movies are favorites of mine. I remember laughing out loud at the car-casting when the first movie was new. These were sort of like 74 Matadors then, with some rabid fans but mostly unloved by the general public. BTTF changed all that.
One other thought crosses my mind – in a parallel universe, how fascinating it would have been if Lynn Townsend had brought John DeLorean in to take over at Chrysler when he stepped down in 1975. I realize that “bringing in an outsider” was not yet the tradition at Chrysler, but he could hardly have done worse than the homegrown team of John Riccardo and Gene Cafiero that we actually got.
Who knows, maybe we would have seen something like the Viper by 1978 or so.
It’s interesting speculation and, in fact, one of the unauthorized biography books has a passage that says the chairman/major stockholder at AMC did exactly that. The story goes that it was a generous offer (including letting Delorean build his sports car) but Delorean thought he could squeeze more out of the deal. The intermediary handling the negotiations passed the info along and the offer was quickly withdrawn. Delorean exclaimed, “Jesus, tell the guy I was just joking!” but it was too late.
But just imagine if the AMC deal had went through.
Rather amazing to see one on the street. It’s almost like seeing something out of context, since we’ve grown accustomed to seeing DeLoreans at car shows, etc. A Ferrari on the street is nothing compared this!
I’m glad to see the photo from the Auto World Museum… I’ve got to say I loved the opportunity to sit in that car. It sort of gave me a whole new angle at which to look at DeLoreans. Though I remember it was mighty hard to actually get in and out of it. Virtually impossible for me to do so gracefully.
Am I the only person in the world that’s never seen BTTF?
The guy I hired as my sales manager at the Telemundo station in the Bay Area drove one of these, as his daily driver. He admitted that it wasn’t exactly a paragon of reliability. He sold it and bought a new Jaguar. That was a bit better in that regard, but not all that much.
If you haven’t, you really should; It’s a genuinely great and fun movie.
No, I haven’t either!
I did once, thirty-odd years ago and I’m still trying to figure out what was so special about it. The section mentioning the movie has been tamed considerably from my original. Last time I opined about a movie, Jurassic Park to be specific, it created a fuss.
In short, you haven’t missed anything.
Back to the Future was a good movie and I certainly enjoyed the series. However, I saw it back in the context of the times of when it was released. Watching a movie for the first time in 2019, it probably wouldn’t come across as an especially significant movie. For those of us though that saw it back when it was new, it was great. It was certainly was one of the more better movies of my youth.
Some were more influenced than others such as this fellow who restored one of the movie Deloreans. It’s a worthwhile watch if you’re a fan of Jay Leno’s garage.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=OD8430xJRbM
I’m curious to know what movies some of you consider worthwhile watches instead of the Back to the Futures and Jurassic Parks. Just to know if it’s the movies themselves or the genres they’re part of that are the turn offs?
I’d concede that these movies are a little overrated from a cultural zeitgeist standpoint, yet I still believe them to be perfect movies for the stories they tell and the images we see. The overrated part comes in when every movie in the action/adventure genre since has to consciously hold up to them as a standard, which they rarely do. That’s why they hold up so well to date, there hasn’t been a better film about Dinosaurs since 1993 and there hasn’t been a better film about time travel since 1985.
Wonderful question.
As for the dinosaur movie, I found it irritatingly predictable. The snarky part of me wants to say another has never been made as nobody likes to repeat a mistake, but I won’t. 🙂
As for the time travel trilogy (of which I’ve only seen the first one) I think VinceC may have nailed it – it’s easy to fall into the trap of viewing it from the lens of 2019. In researching this I did view some clips of it I found on youtube; I do give it credit for time travel as it transported me right back to 1985. That’s not all bad I suppose.
And, for the record, while I have a limited appetite for popular culture, I am really not the cranky old bastard such expressions may make me appear to be. Honest!
The mind-blowing part of the dinosaur movie was the special effects, which completely blew me away in 1993. From the 2019 viewpoint, special effects like that are standard features of any movie so other parts stand out more. Though it is a bit predictable, it’s still a bit fresh compared what’s out there now as it seems every movie now follows the same formula exactly whereas the dinosaur movie at least deviated from it a bit.
As for the time travel movies, I haven’t watched them since they were originally cool. I’ve been thinking about watching them again, will be interesting to see if they are as good as I remember them. There’s some other movies from around then, such as ones involving mutated turtles that know martial arts which I figure I should never watch again because I know they aren’t going to hold up to how I remember them.
I tend to lean to highbrow and lowbrow, and avoid the middle (meaning Hollywood). Roma is the best movie I’ve seen in a while. In the 1980s? John Waters. 🙂
I find myself agreeing with XR7Matt here (first time ever? 🙂 Just kidding, we just have different viewpoints on some things. Anyway, Jurassic Park was and still is the only movie that brought the dinosaur world to real life for me. I did read the book as well (I think afterward) and it brought it to life; envisioning the creatures, how they move, interact etc. was phenomenal. Sure, parts of the story were a little kitshy but viewed from a Hollywood standpoint and needing/wanting to appeal across age groups it worked. The book, by the way, gets rid of the dumber stuff and is quite readable even now.
BackToTheFuture (of which I only saw the first one) was a huge hit with my peer group (I was 16 in 1985) and the whole Michael J. Fox thing was huge at the time, the area it was filmed in was I believe near where I lived, and the story was good, if again, a little “Hollywood”. But not everything is a documentary I suppose. I don’t enjoy stupidly kitshy or lowbrow movies at all, and can appreciate a very serious film, but at the time surrounded by John Hughes movies (which I enjoyed tremendously (and re-enjoy periodically) tremendously, as well as other “teen” fare such as WarGames etc but to weirder (more realistic? certainly seems like ripped from the headlines nowadays) stuff like River’s Edge it was quite entertaining and did many things very well. The movie did trade hugely on MJF, but from an artistic viewpoint watching Crispin Glover in that and then soon after watching him in River’s Edge is just freaky so there’s that as well.
The other thing BTTF did is made Marty a “normal guy” from my high school. He liked the same Toyota truck that many of us did, the girls were like the ones running around my school, and it was “imaginable” (I think you know what I mean). Maybe the appeal does depend more on how relatable it is? I don’t know. I liked Footloose too in general but could not relate at the time to the small school, backwards (to me) mentality of the townfolk etc…It didn’t seem imaginable but looking back these days doesn’t seem that out of the believable (the setting, that is).
There’s one on BaT right now:
https://bringatrailer.com/listing/1981-delorean-dmc-12-16/
Regarding painted Deloreans-
In a body shop, it’s just about impossible to restore stainless steel panels to match the factory finish, and of course body filler stands out like graffiti. The fix? Lay on a coat of paint…
Certainly some owners paint their cars to express their personal style, but before buying any painted Delorean, inspect it very carefully for body repairs.
Nice appreciation of an effort that was probably always doomed to fail. Of course, the only reason the UK govt invested was to lessen the effects of 20 years of the troubles in Northern Ireland, centered on civil rights and tolerance of difference.
I saw a Delorean one evening a few years ago, pulled up at the curb, and at a car show I organised last year, we had a convoy (OK, 2) Deloreans drive in. Certainly got interest that day.
The painted cars were not factory jobs.
These were truly terrible cars. But I love looking at them.
Nice find Jason! There is a DeLorean locally here that is used as a semi daily driver during the warm months but other than that finding one in the wild it’s pretty rare. I have never sat in one of these, but John DeLorean was about six foot four and it was apparently built to fit his frame comfortably. So as a tall person I’d likely find it comfortable too. I can’t say I’d ever have any interest in owning one of these, but I do find them quite interesting vehicles.
Excellent post, and a great find Jason. The DeLorean may have ultimately been a somewhat milquetoast exotic car, but it sure made the era it was in, a little more interesting. Delorean had the buzz of Tesla, circa 1981. I was a young teenager then, and has subscriptions to R&T, MT, and C&D. The DeLorean was by far the most talked about car story when it came out. Chrysler’s comeback was big news as well, but the K cars didn’t have the allure of the DeLorean story. I still thank the DeLorean for making a rather staid era in car history, and culture in general, a but more memorable for me.
A couple of years ago, a friend in one of our craft beer clubs brought one of these to the Tuesday night beer social at Max’s on Broadway in Fells Point in Baltimore (a real famous beer bar). This guy was in his eighties at the time, but still a very active guy.
I got to sit in the driver’s seat and have to agree with Jason that this is a very comfortable car for one so low to the ground. He drove me around the block and back to my car. It was pretty cool.
He bought the car new and after several years of daily driver service, he retired it to hobby car status.
Every time he drove it to the beer functions though, he had to endure the inevitable Back to the Future references that came with owning the car.
The Delorean works specifically because of two things, the gull wing doors and the stainless steel bodywork. The night is where that finish really stuns, ever notice the bulk of the scenes featuring the DeLorean in the first Back to the Future were at night?
However, painted Deloreans =
I’ve seen Deloreans with the BTTF set up, and while I appreciate seeing them in real life, I will admit that me and pop culture replicas have never been on the best speaking terms. While I will admit there’s things that are hard for me to separate from a piece of media when it comes to whatever you can think of, but it gets tiring when something isn’t judged on its own merits or shortcomings because inevitably the iconography of it automatically seems to shield it from criticism, legitimate or otherwise. Separated from the 1.81 gigawatts and flux capacitors, this was a car that was all style and no substance, a sordid tale of compromise and hubris that reads less like the creation of a vehicle and more like a spy thriller. I still have a soft spot for it, but I’m willing to admit that it could’ve been much better than it actually is.
I only saw BTTF when I was in middle school, and the reaction I had was admittedly “eh” at best. While I may be one of those with a soft spot for everything 80s and feel like the general film landscape has gone down drastically since the turn of the 2010s, the film never really elicited any strong positive feelings for me to really want to revisit it and reassess my opinion of it. There are far better sci-fi, comedy, summer blockbuster, and other general films that revel in their “80s-ness” that BTTF is little more than a blip to me, despite how well revered it is. (Though the main theme is still brilliant)
I remember right after the Delorean/cocaine scandal broke, somebody I knew had a cocaine holder in the shape of the Delorean coupe. It was also in that dull silver-metallic color. Great, timely gag, but I refused it when he offered me some!
There was one parked just off the street on Ralston in Belmont, CA when I lived there (it may still be there, I saw it regularly for years). While semi-regularly seen in CA, they are always a headturner, both before BTTF as well as after. One always wonders if an owner was a fan before or only since. Either way, they are distinctive and this is a great find.
My good friend Don, half a generation older than me, used to be a car salesman in the early 80’s and worked at a joint Olds-DeLorean dealer of all things in Ohio of all places. He never did sell a DeLorean but did sell plenty of Cutlasses, big shocker there. His reminisces of the DeLoreans was of a lot of repairs needed right upon delivery to the dealership, basically the “finishing line” of the factory, much more so than the Olds’s.
I remember seeing the red one in Auburn, and have seen a couple of other painted examples over the years, they leave me completely cold, it’s sort of ruined not being stainless, IMO.