Flux capacitor not included
’80s supercar DeLorean makes a comeback
INTERVIEW. The first of automaker John DeLorean’s stainless steel DeLorean DMC-12s was manufactured in 1981. The last rolled off the Belfast assembly line in 1982. But according to James Espey, vice president of the privately owned DeLorean Motor Co., the car remains popular today — so popular that next year, his Humble, Texas, shop will produce 20 brand new ones.
Up until now, you’ve just been rebuilding old DeLoreans.
For the past 25 years or so, we’ve been doing service and restoration and selling parts. For about the last five years, we’ve been selling what we call completely remanufactured cars. We start with an old DeLorean that hasn’t had such a nice life, strip it to its bare frame, and using this inventory of parts, make a new DeLorean from that shell. As we run out of parts here, we have a full set of engineering drawings, so we have stuff made again. Now we’re to the point where the quality of the donor cars is getting so bad and prices of them, as with all DeLoreans, are going up so much that it’s more cost-effective and time-effective to just start with a new underbody that we make here with some of the tooling that we acquired out of the factory.
Why purchase the remains of a failed automobile maker?
When the factory closed, there was a company called Consolidated International, which is now known as Big Lots. Back then, Consolidated International had loaned John DeLorean’s company money on about 1,000 or so cars that had already been built, but not yet sold. When John’s company went under, they took possession of all of those cars. Up until ’97, if you owned a DeLorean, you could buy parts from a guy like me or you could buy them from this company in Ohio. In the mid-’90s, they started making rumblings about getting out of the DeLorean business altogether, and we made an offer to buy everything, because we had a long-term plan of being the biggest fish in probably one of the smallest automotive ponds — or parking lots, I guess — in the world.
What is the appeal of these cars?
There are probably worldwide about 100 people who make their livelihood strictly off DeLoreans. The typical person who’s buying the car now is a guy who was in his teens, maybe his 20s, when “Back to the Future” came out in ’85. Now he’s at the position in his life where he can get the car he wanted when he was younger. It’s a car people realize is very practical — as least as practical as any two-seater car can be. One of the things I hear all the time is that there’s nothing in this price range that can give you as much bang for the buck. Our re-manned cars now start at $42,500. What can you get at $42,500 that’s going to get you the kind of attention that a stainless-steel, gull-winged-door car can? For $40,000 you can get a Toyota pickup, a Volvo, a very low-end Mercedes — or you can get a DeLorean.
