LOOK WHAT'S COMING BACK!

John Z. DeLorean's Dream is Back!

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John DeLorean was in many ways the Sir Richard Branson of three decades--the mid 1960's through the early 1980's. He passed away in Summit, New Jersey on May 19, 2005 from a stroke at age 80. But the car he created 30 years ago that was made famous in the Michael J. Fox movie "Back to the Future" is being resurrected by enthusiasts who purchased a sizable inventory of parts left over from the collapse of the car company in Belfast, Ireland. Tony Ierardi and Stephen Wynne have started building new cars in Humble, Texas to the exact specification of the 30-year old design. While an estimated 2/3 of the 9,000 cars sold are said to still be on the road, the new DMC-12's will cost $57,500 and will be hand assembled at a rate of 9 per year. The car was quite a mix of parts. The engine, for instance, was a Douvrin V-6 made by Renault, Peugeot and Volvo, while Lotus designed the chassis and bodywork details. The factory started manufacturing cars in early 1981, but the company landed in receivership by February 1982. After 21 months, the British government ordered its closure in November 1982. A highly publicized cocaine sting operation preceded the company (and John's) fall from the heights of enormous success.

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Born in the same poverty-ridden area of Detroit where my Grandmother lived, John had a Romanian father and Hungarian mother. After graduating with a degree in mechanical engineering, John's talents at Packard Motor Car Company ultimately led him to become the head of GM's Pontiac Motor Car Division. A corporate "maverick", John was an engineering and designing genius who is perhaps most famous for "taking the bull by the horns" at Pontiac and creating the high performance GTO in 1964, the Camaro, the Firebird and the Grand Prix before retiring at age 48. "I want to do things in the social area", he said at his retirement. "I have to do them, and unfortunately, the nature of our business didn't permit me to do as much as I wanted." He owned equity positions in the New York Yankees and his social circles included Johnny Carson (and attractive women). Married four times, including his 1969 marriage to model Kelly Harmon and later Christina Ferrare, his latter marriage and personal problems came to a head in 1985. He remarried but was forced by former creditors still pursuing John to file bankruptcy in 1999. When the film "Back to the Future" came out in 1985, featuring De Lorean's namesake car, De Lorean wrote a letter to one of the movie's producers and writers, Bob Gale, thanking him for immortalizing the car in the film. (The letter can be seen in the special features of the Back to the Future DVD release).

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I've read John's biography, and while many questioned his innocence in a government sting operation, John won the case and proved that he was the victim of government entrapment. As recently as 2003, he had on file a patent for a Metro train design, and he was said to be experimenting with both a watch design and one last hurrah. An all-composite body high performance sports car that could reach 0-60 in just 6 seconds and sell for $18,000.00. His last car was a Canary Yellow Acura NSX. Like others before him, the conspirators behind the demise of the original DeLorean Motor Car Company (on both sides of the Atlantic) failed to stem the order books for thousands of cars that were never built. The old saying of "Oh, what a complicated web we weave" may characterize Johns book in the minds of some. But I believed him to be innocent. Yes, there were mechanical and performance complications with the car with its all-stainless steel body and gull-wing doors. You be the judge on the book, simply called "DeLorean". I for one would have loved to spend an afternoon interviewing John. He was an automobile enthusiast's ideal of a true "visionary". And this piece of news made me smile today.