DeLorean - Back to the Present?

Movie fans might have a hard time naming more than a handful of cars they have seen on the big screen: there's Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, The General Lee from Dukes Of Hazzard, Herbie The Love Bug, and the classy Aston Martin belonging to James Bond, but many would argue that there is only one that really caught the public's imagination.

The silver, gull-winged, rear-engine DeLorean seems to have remained entrenched in popular culture since the first Back To The Future movie in 1985, and even as Universal Studios closes their Back To The Future - The Ride, there are serious plans afoot in California to unleash the Irish-built car back onto the freeways once again.

According to a recent edition of the LA Times, Danny Botkin - who was a teenager in the 1980's when the three Back To The Future movies came out - is now the proud owner of what was then his dream car, and much more besides. He drives a restored DeLorean modeled after the flux-capacitor-driven time machine, and also manages a repair and refurbishing shop in Garden Grove that has ties to the DeLorean Motor Co, a Texan company that rebuilds DeLoreans and is looking to bring it back into limited production.

DeLorean received around £50,000,000 (around $90,000,000) of public money to set up production at a plant in Dunmurry near Belfast in the North of Ireland - then suffering at the height of The Troubles - as part of a campaign to bring 2,000 jobs to the town.

Born in Detroit, Michigan, designer John DeLorean had been a hotshot at General Motors - he apparently came up with the GTO and the Firebird - and when he decided to go it alone he went for an image to suit his car design: flashy clothes and glamorous girlfriends.

Enormously radically and innovative, the car seemed certain to succeed, but DeLorean just could not sell enough of the (then very expensive) $25,000 cars to stay afloat. By 1982 his dream was over, and he was even charged with trafficking cocaine. He beat the charges though, and must have been overjoyed to see his dream car live on - he died in March 2005.

In total only around 9,000 DeLorean's were built in 1981/2, although around 6,500 are still on the road - many of them in North America - and most of that is arguably due to the appearance of the car on the big screen. Directed by Robert Zemeckis, Back To The Future was the biggest movie of 1985 and made Michael J Fox a star, yet it was almost an old refrigerator that was used for the time machine, until co-writer Bob Gale saw the car and loved it's futuristic look
- especially those unique doors:

"John DeLorean wrote us a fan letter after the movie came out: �â'¬Å"Thank you for keeping my dream alive�".

As a search on the internet shows, there are DeLorean fans from the USA to Norway, and many dozens of driver/owners gathered at Universal Studios Hollywood theme park in early August to see a ceremony marking the last month for the roller coaster ride. Actor Christopher Lloyd, who played the crazy scientist and inventor Doc Brown in the movies, set the clock tower countdown to the last day, September 3.

However, the unending appeal of the car seems likely to keep Espey and other shops across the USA very busy in the future. Espey cleverly acquired the parts and engines that were left over after DeLorean's company went belly up, and he also owns the trademarks and many of the original engineering blueprints. His 20-man team takes on around a dozen rebuilds a year, and has an eight-month waiting list. At the garage in Garden Grove there are usually around 15 cars in for service or refurbishing at any time, but with only 200 of the original 2.8-liter V-6 engines still in stock and original cars hard to find for refurbishing, it seems that within a year or so they will actually start manufacturing the cars from scratch, over 25 years after the factory was closed and they were given up for dead.

There are only plans for around 20 cars a year, but who knows what the future will bring? And there's no question that people love the car, as Botkin attests:

"I can't park it without attracting a pile of people. We like to cruise up and down PCH just to get people's reactions. It's a smile maker."

This reporter has come across a couple of DeLoreans here in Los Angeles, and they still have somewhat of an aura about them: you feel like you have to touch the bonnet just to see if it's real, and hasn't beamed in from the future. There was even a DeLorean at a nearby garage for several months, looking rather dusty but standing out amongst all the other cars around it as it waited for repair (see picture).

Thinking of driving around in your own Irish-connected piece of movie history? The prices compare well to those for other - less interesting - cars: buying and restoring a used DeLorean will cost about $25,000, and you can have one stripped and completely rebuilt for around $42,500 upwards.

Prices for new ones are yet to be decided, although to honor the closing of the Universal Studios ride on Labor Day, there is a chance for one of the last of many million riders to win a real DeLorean with only 60,000 miles - and many hundreds of years - on the clock.