Was The DeLorean Actually A Bad Car? Folks, I Need To Talk About This One

I'm telling you folks... few cars on this entire planet have lied to me as beautifully as the DeLorean DMC-12.

photo rendering by: Jancoex.com

You look at that thing and your brain just screams SUPERCAR. Stainless steel body panels that never need paint. Gullwing doors that open straight up like some kind of spaceship. A low, wedge shaped silhouette drawn by Giorgetto Giugiaro, the same legend who penned the Lotus Esprit. My goodness, this car looks like it should eat a Ferrari 308 for breakfast and ask for seconds.

And then you actually drive it.

Here's the gut punch. A manual DeLorean needed over nine full seconds to hit 60 miles per hour. The automatic? Even worse, crawling past 60 in something like eleven seconds. Eleven! I've seen minivans with more urgency than that. You're sitting behind the wheel of a car that looks like it teleported in from the year 3000, and it accelerates like it's still stuck negotiating with 1974.

So was the DeLorean a bad car? Honestly... it's complicated. And I love that it's complicated, because the real story is so much juicier than a simple yes or no.

The Engine Was Never The Real Villain Here

Let's clear something up right away, because a lot of people get this wrong. The rear mounted V6 tucked into the DeLorean wasn't garbage. It was a PRV unit, a joint effort between Peugeot, Renault, and Volvo, and it quietly powered a whole fleet of respectable European cars for years. This was not some cursed engine cooked up in someone's garage.

The problem was what American emissions laws did to it. Once the smog equipment got bolted on for the US market, that V6 was strangled down to just 130 horsepower. In a car this shape, that number feels like an insult. It's like giving a greyhound the lungs of a house cat and wondering why it can't win the race.

DeLorean actually knew this was a problem. There were serious attempts at a twin turbo version to wake the thing up and finally deliver the performance the body had been promising the whole time. Absolute madness that it never made it to full production, because by most accounts a boosted DMC-12 was a genuinely different animal.

The Chassis Story Is Wilder Than You'd Expect

Here's where I get a little obsessed, because most people have no idea how close this car came to being an absolute disaster before it even hit the road.

The original plan wasn't even this car. John DeLorean's team was fiddling with an experimental fiberglass chassis and a rotary engine setup that just wasn't ready for prime time. With the clock running out and money burning fast, they brought in Colin Chapman and his team at Lotus to save the whole project.

Chapman basically gutted the underdeveloped engineering and replaced it with a steel backbone chassis borrowed straight from the playbook of the Lotus Esprit. That's not a small save. That's a legend of automotive engineering swooping in and rebuilding the foundation of the car while the body design stayed mostly untouched.

So underneath that spaceship exterior sits some genuinely respected chassis engineering. The DeLorean wasn't a fake from the ground up. It's more like a beautiful, dramatic body wrapped around a drivetrain that never got to reach its full potential.

The Price Tag Tells Its Own Story

Remember that "12" in DMC-12? It was supposed to represent a $12,000 target price. A genuinely attainable sports car for the everyday dreamer.

It'll leave your jaw on the floor when I tell you what actually happened. By the time the first production car rolled off the line in Northern Ireland in January of 1981, the sticker price had ballooned all the way up to $25,000. That's more than double the original dream, and buyers were paying for a name and a shape, not necessarily for the driving experience underneath.

Add in some well documented quality control headaches from a brand new factory with an inexperienced workforce trying to build a car nobody had ever mass produced before, and you start to see the whole picture forming.

So... Was It Actually Bad

Here's my honest take, and I'll give it to you straight like I'd tell my best friend before they hand over their savings for one.

The DeLorean was never a great sports car. If you bought it in 1981 expecting Countach level thrills, you got burned, and that disappointment was real and it was earned. The performance simply did not match the promise plastered all over that stainless steel body.

But calling it a bad car misses the point entirely.

This was a genuinely ambitious, slightly chaotic, deeply human attempt to build something different. A steel backbone chassis engineered by one of the greatest minds in motorsport. A design so striking that it's still instantly recognizable more than four decades later. A company that collapsed by 1982, only for the car to be immortalized a few years later as the time machine in Back to the Future, turning a commercial flop into one of the most beloved movie cars ever made.

Around nine thousand of these things were ever built. Nine thousand. And yet almost everyone on the planet can picture one perfectly in their head.

That's not the legacy of a bad car, folks. That's the legacy of a car that promised the future and, in its own stumbling, gorgeous, underpowered way, actually delivered a piece of it.