It’s a DeLorean, right?
Sort of.
That’s not a 1980s icon you’re seeing – it’s the spiritual successor to one. It’s not built by the team behind the famous car. A new company has formed under different leadership and adopted a similar name. The above image isn’t even a photograph of the car, but a digital rendering of what the company plans for the new vehicle to look like.
Those are important caveats, and we’ll get to them. But for now, let’s take a moment to enjoy the look of an angular supercar challenger with gull-wing doors and a louvered rear window in silver that suggests bare stainless steel.
The History
The original DeLorean was one of the most successful wild failures of the 1980s.
Successful because it graced millions of posters and one of history’s most successful film series (all three Back to the Future movies, if you’re young enough to have missed that). Failure because reviewers found its performance underwhelming compared to its looks, quality problems plagued the few thousand actually built, and the company behind it went under in just a few years while its owner faced drug trafficking charges.
The Heir
That DeLorean Motor Company disappeared in 1982. But a generation that grew up wanting to own a DeLorean has never quite given up on the dream.
This latest attempt comes from a company calling itself DeLorean Motors Reimagined (DMR).
They imagine big things – plans call for this four-seater plus an all-electric coupe, a V8-powered supercar, and a hydrogen fuel-cell SUV. But first, they’re going for the nostalgia play.
They’re calling it the Alpha5, and it’s an electric vehicle (EV).
DMR won’t give many details on the powertrain yet. CEO Joost de Vries said, “The car is being built in Italy – we’ve outsourced that – and we have some partners in the UK on the powertrain side.” But they will say the battery has over 100 kilowatt-hours of storage, and the platform uses “multiple electric motors.”
That second bit likely means all-wheel-drive – many EVs use separate motors on each axle or wheel to achieve variable grip at all four corners. It’s good for a 0-60 mph sprint of under 3 seconds, the company stated, and a range of over 300 miles.
And it has the classic gull-wing doors, louvered rear window, and three-layer tail lights of the poster car of the 1980s.
We’ll have to wait for August to know more, as that’s when the car will no longer be just a digital drawing. It will appear in the sheet metal at the Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance.
The Questions
At the Pebble Beach show, we hope to learn more. In the meantime, we have some questions. They include the price and whether this DeLorean company will stick around longer than its namesake.
As a possible clue to the price tag, de Vries mentioned the Porsche Taycan Turbo S and Tesla Model S Plaid as possible rivals. That would suggest a price target somewhere north of $150,000.
De Vries told the UK’s Autocar that the first 88 models won’t be road legal. Instead, they will “serve as an avatar for an associated NFT, meaning they won’t be road-registered and suitable only for track use.” That doesn’t sound encouraging for those who want a DeLorean company that lasts.
We also want to know whether they’ll move the climate controls so that they’re not blocked by the touchscreen – an odd design touch that is, hopefully, a mistake only in the CGI version.
