DeLorean DMC-12! Looking Back to the Future - The Downshift Ep. 76
On this episode of The Downshift
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MotorTranscript
00:00 (dramatic music)
00:02 - To drive a DeLorean,
00:05 it's a completely different experience
00:07 from the moment you sit into it
00:08 and opening up a gold-winged door.
00:11 - I was a teenager about the time
00:12 that the DeLorean came out back in 1981,
00:15 and it just was so different than anything else out there.
00:17 - There's always a story to be told about DeLoreans.
00:28 - John DeLorean started his career
00:30 as an engineer with General Motors.
00:32 - From that point, he rose very quickly through GM
00:34 to be the youngest vice president,
00:36 and by the early '70s, he was in charge of Chevrolet.
00:41 I think John DeLorean felt hamstrung a bit
00:43 within the constraints of General Motors.
00:46 He wanted to build a car
00:47 that was the way he thought they should be built.
00:49 - And that would last beyond the regular model cycle
00:52 of cars lasting two or three years,
00:54 and then rusting away.
00:55 - John knew that in order to have his car stand out
00:58 in the marketplace, it needed to be different.
01:00 Stainless provided a unique solution to that
01:03 by obviously not rusting,
01:05 and it also solved the problem of having to put
01:07 very expensive paint facilities in at the factory.
01:10 The gold-winged doors had only been used
01:12 on a couple of other cars prior to that.
01:14 John intended for the car to be an extremely safe car,
01:16 and after working with the car
01:18 as long as we have here, about 30 years,
01:20 yeah, that is the case.
01:21 - You know, they got quite a lot right the first go-round.
01:25 The first prototypes were completed '76, '77.
01:28 While they were looking for a place to build the factory,
01:30 they very quickly discovered as soon as they mentioned
01:32 they were gonna add about 2,000 to 2,500 jobs,
01:35 lots of governments came to them saying,
01:37 "We'd like you to build the factory here."
01:39 So John began to shop for the best financial deal
01:43 'cause he knew that it would take a lot of money.
01:45 But then the Northern Ireland Development Agency
01:48 came through in 1978.
01:50 They started with a greenfield plant of about 90 acres.
01:53 They were able to build a factory, design a car,
01:57 hire people, train people, and start production
02:00 in the span of about 28 months,
02:01 which is a record that probably still stands today
02:03 30 years later.
02:04 The first cars were built,
02:07 and they started to ship to dealers in the summer of 1981.
02:11 - The auto industry was in a slump.
02:13 Nobody knew what was gonna happen,
02:15 and bump, out comes this car
02:16 that looked like nothing else before.
02:18 - The stainless body and the gold-winged doors,
02:20 it was a spaceship on wheels.
02:22 - The press was abuzz.
02:23 Initial public response was fantastic.
02:25 - Everybody was going nuts for it,
02:27 and it was a showstopper.
02:28 You'd pull up, and there would be crowds around.
02:30 - There were some reports of people paying
02:32 more than $10,000 over sticker price.
02:34 - Everybody would be clamoring to see one and touch one,
02:37 which is still the same now.
02:38 Everybody has to touch a DeLorean, you know?
02:40 - Troubles for the company first really started
02:45 in late 1981.
02:47 In order to improve the stock offering that was planned,
02:51 they needed to be building a certain number of cars,
02:53 and have a certain number of people employed.
02:55 John took a gamble,
02:56 and ordered production of the car doubled.
02:58 - As far as the economy was concerned,
03:00 interest rates were extremely high.
03:02 - And we got hit with the worst winter in about 30 years.
03:05 So car sales pretty much dropped almost to nothing.
03:09 - So it was extremely difficult to sell anything,
03:12 let alone an expensive sports car.
03:15 - The factory kept going, building these cars,
03:17 hoping that the market would turn around in time.
03:20 By early '82, it was clear that that wasn't gonna happen.
03:22 John lost control of the factory in May, 1982.
03:26 He needed to come up with a certain amount of money
03:28 to regain control of the factory.
03:31 About this time, he was approached by one of his neighbors,
03:34 and he told John that he could help him
03:36 get any kind of money he needed.
03:38 In the summer of '82, when John realized, you know,
03:40 that this was some kind of a drug deal,
03:42 he tried to back out.
03:43 According to his testimony, his family was threatened.
03:45 They threatened to cut his daughter's head off
03:46 and send it home in a shopping bag.
03:48 He didn't feel he had any option
03:49 except to continue to go along with the deal.
03:52 - It turns out that this was a sting operation.
03:54 - I think the DEA at that period wanted a big bust,
03:57 wanted to make a name for themselves.
04:00 - In late October of '82, he was arrested.
04:02 By the time John DeLorean went to trial in 1984,
04:06 the company was gone.
04:07 It filed for bankruptcy.
04:09 The factory contents had been sold or auctioned off.
04:12 - The DEA actually set him up, and it was entrapment.
04:15 Truth be known is, he never went to jail.
04:17 He was completely acquitted of all the drug charges.
04:21 - When the factory closed in late 1982,
04:24 there was literally millions of parts
04:27 to build cars still in the factory.
04:29 And it's that inventory which we now have
04:31 in our facility here.
04:32 We've got a 40,000 square foot facility
04:35 full of literally millions new old stock,
04:38 brand new 30-year-old DeLorean parts.
04:40 Out of the 2,800 or so different parts
04:42 it takes to make up a DeLorean,
04:43 we've got better than 98% parts availability.
04:45 One of the other things that we acquired
04:48 with this inventory of parts
04:49 was a complete set of engineering drawings
04:52 and all the engineering records for the parts on the car.
04:54 So as we run out of stuff,
04:55 we have a network of suppliers and manufacturers
04:58 all around the world who we work with
05:00 to have some of these parts reproduced.
05:02 You can't talk about DeLorean cars
05:07 without talking about Back to the Future.
05:08 In the earliest versions of the script,
05:10 they had intended to use a refrigerator
05:13 as the time machine, and quickly realized
05:16 that they didn't want kids climbing into refrigerators,
05:18 because back in the days they had doors
05:19 that couldn't open from the insides,
05:21 and they decided it would be easier
05:23 to use some kind of an automobile,
05:24 since the company went out of business.
05:26 It's been the greatest thing to happen to the DeLorean car.
05:30 I guarantee that some place in the world right now,
05:32 one of those movies is on TV some place.
05:34 So someone new is being exposed
05:36 to the DeLorean car for the first time.
05:38 John left a legacy in the form of 9,000 or so cars
05:44 that bear his name.
05:45 I think one of the reasons the DeLorean
05:47 remains sort of timeless,
05:50 because the DeLorean never went
05:51 through that evolutionary process.
05:53 Because that didn't happen,
05:56 the DeLorean is essentially frozen in time.
05:59 You know, and as decades go,
06:00 there are always certain things that stick out,
06:03 and DeLorean is definitely, you know,
06:05 an iconic part of the '80s.
06:07 Had DeLorean had survived that period in time
06:13 and continued, there would be a Big Four now,
06:16 there wouldn't be a Big Three.
06:17 DeLorean himself, he made DeLorean,
06:20 and he also took it down.
06:22 As the story goes, apparently,
06:31 on the day that he was actually arrested,
06:33 they actually had an investment bank lined up.
06:36 So they'd actually arranged
06:37 for the resurrection of the company,
06:39 and all they had to do was sign the document.
06:41 And they were looking for him all day,
06:43 they couldn't find him.
06:44 And then the next thing they heard,
06:46 that he was on the six o'clock news
06:47 as having been arrested in Los Angeles airport.
06:51 And that was the end of it.
06:52 The financing went away,
06:53 and they just had that one last chance,
06:56 and it didn't happen.
06:57 [BLANK_AUDIO]