Petersen Archive: John Z's Dream Car - The DeLorean DMC-12
By Kristin Feay
What do Giorgetto Giugiaro, the AMC Pacer, and Dunmurry, Northern Ireland have in common? They were all, in some way or another, involved in the creation of this car, the DeLorean DMC- 12. Today, the DMC-12, shown above in its prototype form, is most commonly known for its role as the Time Machine in the Back to the Future film trilogy. The DeLorean’s stainless-steel finish, however, began capturing attention before the car made its on-screen debut in 1985.
One of the many enthralled with the DeLorean story was undoubtedly Motor Trend magazine, who would feature the car in multiple detailed articles published throughout 1977 and 1981. Giving the public a glimpse of the story behind the steel, these articles provided a technical analysis of the enigmatic DMC-12, the company that created it, and insight into the magazine’s various views of the venture.
Perhaps indicative of the car’s place in the automotive industry, the magazine began by introducing the DeLorean with a question. In a headline printed underneath the photograph of the DMC shown speeding above, writer Karl Ludvigsen asked, “is a brand-new auto company in America producing a brand-new sports car big news? We think so.” The question, posited in Motor Trend’s September 1977 issue, belied not only the growing interest in the DMC-12, but also the prevailing idea that the American auto industry had grown into a cumbersome and uninspiring apparatus in which innovation was the sole purvey of foreign imports. It needed a hero, a role which Motor Trend proposed the DeLorean could fulfill.
Accordingly, in its 1977 article the magazine introduced the DMC-12 with an air of optimism, a view which at the time seemed well founded. Though the DeLorean Motor Company promoted itself as an unorthodox and unprecedented venture, the company’s founder, John Z. DeLorean was no stranger to the automotive industry. Before founding DMC, he had accrued much experience, and success, as a high ranking executive at General Motors.
At GM, DeLorean oversaw the design of a number of notable vehicles ranging from the iconic Pontiac Tempest, which won the Motor Trend car of the year award in 1961, to the not-so-iconic Chevrolet Vega, which won in 1971 (the latter is the award DeLorean (right) is shown receiving in the photograph above). Despite this success, two years after this photograph was taken, DeLorean would break from GM and, publicly criticizing the Detroit giant’s policies, form his own DeLorean Motor Company.
According to Motor Trend, DeLorean’s strategy with his new company was to start off with a car “for which there is no direct price/volume competition.” The dramatic DMC-12 was to be this car.
Designed by Italian stylist Giorgetto Giugiaro in his signature sharp-edged or “folded-paper” style, the DMC-12 was theatrical and flamboyant. Like many contemporary supercars, it combined lean, uncompromising lines with an extremely low profile and distinctive accents like gull-wing doors. Bolstering its wildly unconventional image, the two-seater was unabashedly clad in panels of raw stainless-steel. Nonetheless, the DMC was meant to have an inherently utilitarian design. Its stainless-steel finish was intended not to rust, its materials were selected to “save on resources,” and its construction was meant to be reliable.
In this, the DMC-12 combined many seemingly opposing extremes, appearing wherever it went, like some wild Italian interpretation of a Casio calculator.
The question was, how would this all translate into a production vehicle? In Motor Trend’s 1977 article on the DeLorean prototype, which incidentally announced the car for production in 1979, Karl Ludvigsen explained this process as a saga of struggle, compromise, and unexpected anomaly.
As chronicled by Motor Trend, DeLorean’s quest began with an attempt to fit his new car with no fewer than three different engine types, one of these being the same Wankel engine design that was fitted to GM’s mid-engine Corvette prototype (this plan was abandoned after the engines became unavailable.) This wasn’t the only bump that the DMC would hit on its road to realization, however. Due to a contractual oversight, Giorgetto Giugiaro did not provide detailed drawings of the DeLorean’s surfaces, supplying only a full-scale model, which had to be digitally scanned to allow production of the prototype.
Since DMC lacked the resources to build all of the components it needed from scratch, the company had to procure some of the parts for its prototype from vehicles built by other companies. Its suspension, for instance, borrowed its wishbones from an AMC Pacer.
Despite these hiccups, Ludvigsen remained positive about the DMC’s chances. Referencing the engineer forced to “make conventional economic compromises that are required for mass production,” as DeLorean himself was quoted as saying, Ludvigsen implored the former GM executive to “make a statement, with your deeds on behalf of all of them.”
As the DeLorean story unfolded, Motor Trend’s confidence in the enterprise seemed only to grow. For the magazine’s next article, published in May 1981, writer Tony Swan introduced the DMC in a soliloquy that seemed as if it could spontaneously summon its own dramatic music and dry-ice-supplied smoke. “The chips are down, the waiting is over, and now the game begins,” Swan began. “John Zachary De Lorean against the odds. John Zachary De Lorean as the game-but vulnerable champion of the all-American Horatio Alger ethic. The last stand of the individual entrepreneur in a business world populated by faceless conglomerate giants.” The DMC-12, according to Swan, was looking more and more like the hero the American auto industry needed.
Between the technical comments about the car’s weight distribution, the power of its engine, and its EPA rated gas mileage, in its May 1981 article Motor Trend was able to give the public a preview of some formerly hazy details about the hard-to-define vehicle.
It was here, for instance, that the magazine introduced that the DMC would be constructed in Northern Ireland as a project funded by the British government to help mitigate tensions between Protestants and Catholics. (Though this fact received little publicity in the US at the time, the car’s prominent presence in Northern Ireland it is often rediscovered by DeLorean restorers who find inscriptions written by DMC workers on the insides of their cars’ body panels). In the May article, Swan also revealed that a Giugiaro-based exterior was not the only thing that the DeLorean would share with the Lotus Esprit. The DMC’s chassis would now also be designed by Colin Chapman, the founder of Lotus. Concluding that “American journalists will be accorded the first ‘official’ test drives,” of the car, Swan promised readers that “staff impressions” would follow in June.
The magazine’s June verdict on the car, however, lacked the same untarnished bravado that pervaded its May article. Opening this time with a warning to “John Z.” that “he’s not going to like everything he hears,” Tony Swan laid out a more detailed technical analysis of the DMC-12 afforded by a visit to the company’s factory. The stainless-steel two-seater initially appeared to pass Motor Trend’s technical analysis. Despite a weight distribution which placed 35% of the vehicle’s weight on its front wheels, and 65% on its rear, Motor Trend observed that “the car sticks amazingly well and exhibits moderate understeer in most cornering situations.”
Swan also commended that the car’s rear-mounted engine, a “PRV,” short for Peugeot-Renault-Volvo, V-6 “is a smooth performer overall and reasonably pleasant to live with.”
As forecasted in the May article, some changes had been made between the prototype and production versions of the DeLorean. The chassis, for instance, no longer made use of advanced plastic ERM, but something that instead looked like “it could have been sectioned out of a railroad trestle.”
The DeLorean’s main problem was its production quality. “Without getting into a laundry list of faults,” Swan noted, “each of the preview cars had various minor flaws of one sort or another.” Door leaks, inoperable windows, and loose trim pieces seemed to be commonplace amongst the vehicles. Motor Trend categorized the stainless steel exterior as a benefit here. At least the DMC factory executives “don’t have to add orange peeled paint to their list of fit and finish problems.”
The lack of consistency in DeLorean production was noticeable. By the time Motor Trend got ahold of a production DMC for a “true” road test, published in December 1981 they observed that “both cars were almost totally free of the numerous fit and finish flaws that plagued the early production cars.” Note here, however, the word “cars.” In order to complete the test, Motor Trend had to summon not one, but two DeLoreans, the second acting as a replacement after the first suffered a fuel system failure in the middle of the test. Flaws, it appeared, including a gas cap design which funneled spilled fuel into the front trunk instead of the tank, persisted.
When it was released in 1981 the DMC appeared at first glance to be a glistening silver dream car, perfect for purchase by a new class of highly affluent “Yuppies,” or Young Urban Professionals, who valued on independent thinking. Underneath its shining silver surface, however, the DeLorean was truly comprised of complex and disparate parts. By the time it arrived on the market, many of its futuristic features had been abandoned, it sold for nearly twice its initially promised price of $12,000, and it failed to achieve supercar style performance. Its construction quality, once promised to be a highlighting feature of the car, also left much to be desired.
One thing the DeLorean did not fail to do, however, was make an impression on those who drove it. “For a high-content, high-quality, highly unique profile piece,” Motor Trend wrote in December 1981, “John Z’s dream car looks like something of a bargain.” As Tony Swan would narrate in his June 1981 preview, when driving the DMC-12 one needed only to “pull the gullwing door down…and you have a sense of being ready for some sort of adventure.”
By Kristin Feay
Photography by Milt Lewis, Bob D’Olivo, Mike Levasheff, and William Claxton