It may have helped Marty McFly travel through time, but the DeLorean proved to be one of the worst cars ever made, leading to John DeLorean being caught up in an FBI drugs sting and accused of stealing from the British taxpayer. So why is his daughter hellbent on getting it back on the road?
“Wait a minute, Doc, are you telling me that you built a time machine … out of a DeLorean?” Marty McFly exclaims.
“The way I see it, if you’re gonna build a time machine into a car, why not do it with some style?” Dr Emmett Brown replies.
Almost 40 years after one of the most distinctive-looking and controversial cars ever conceived rolled out of a cloud of dry ice and into Hollywood legend, it’s back from the future, or rather the past. Kat DeLorean, the daughter of John DeLorean, the man who dreamt up the futuristic machine with stainless-steel body and gull-wing doors, is launching a sports car that she says will bear her name and – she hopes – help clear his.
John was an engineer-turned-celebrity three decades before Elon Musk blazed a similar trail. A maverick like Musk, he had been a shining star of boardrooms at General Motors before turning his back on the established auto industry and setting up his DeLorean Motor Company (DMC) in 1975. Dapper and charismatic, he rubbed shoulders with Hollywood stars and was a darling of the chat show circuit. His marriage to Cristina Ferrare, a beautiful fashion model – Kat’s mother – made them irresistible to headline writers and paparazzi. But his dream turned sour in 1982 – three years before the car he created was immortalised in celluloid in the first Back to the Future film. DMC went into insolvency. DeLorean was accused of embezzling British government money, intended for a car plant he had established near Belfast. The FBI entrapped him in a cocaine-smuggling sting. He was never found guilty in a court of law but his celebrity friends deserted him, Ferrare divorced him and he ended up impoverished and a born-again Christian.
Kat, 46, was a model like her mother before becoming a computer engineer and cybersecurity specialist. Now she wants to shed a different light on her father’s legacy, recasting him as a visionary who was hounded for challenging the corporate might of the auto giants. She is reconciled to the fact that some people will always regard him as a crook and, in the words of her mother, “a malignant narcissist”.
“I’m never going to convince the people who want to believe my father was a bad man that he wasn’t. I’m never going to win that argument today,” she says. “All I can do is change their minds by showing them the person he made me. That’s all I can do. I can tell a new story. Whatever happened, happened, and I’m OK with it.”
The original 1981 DeLorean, the DMC-12, was rushed into production and deeply flawed – in 2017 Time magazine included it on a list of the 50 worst cars of all time – but it remains a classic, prized by collectors and cherished by fans of the Back to the Future trilogy, for which it was chosen by producers because it would have looked like a spaceship to a 1950s family. Only about 9000 were built.
Over the years numerous attempts have been made to reboot it. But each time a new edition springs to life, it flatlines before being quietly buried. Nor is Kat the only one trying to launch a new model. A rival Texas-based firm that bought the assets of the DeLorean Motor Company in 1997 and claims the rights to the DeLorean brand is also attempting to revive the DMC-12. Lawyers are being kept busy on both sides.
So if Kat succeeds in her dual mission of resurrecting her father’s car and repairing his reputation, it could be one of the greatest comebacks in history. It may also reawaken questions about millions of pounds of UK taxpayers’ money allegedly stolen and never recovered. But she is nothing if not determined. She says his only crime was to dream too big and to trust people too easily. So was he one of the world’s greatest conmen – or a risk-taker who rolled the dice once too often?
John DeLorean’s story is a classic rags-to-riches-and-back-again tale. “You don’t know what poor is until you know how poor we were,” he once said. He was born in 1925 in Motor City, the nickname given to Detroit, Michigan, in the days when it was dominated by the Big Three auto giants: General Motors (GM), Chrysler and Ford. The son of immigrants, his mother was Hungarian, his father Romanian and a union organiser at Ford.
John was a precocious talent, excelling at electronics at Cass Technical High School and gaining a degree in industrial engineering from the Lawrence Institute of Technology. In the 1950s he was fast-tracked for success at GM, where he earned a reputation for having the popular touch. He helped design and launch some of the era’s most desirable cars including the Pontiac GTO and Firebird. His relaxed style of dress and speech set him apart from other buttoned-up executives, and he eventually became disillusioned with corporate culture in Motor City.
He struck out on his own in 1973 – the year he married Ferrare, his third wife, a 23-year-old model 25 years his junior. He set up the DeLorean Motor Company with a dream of making a stylish, low-emissions car long before such a notion was fashionable. Initially he used loans from Bank of America and money raised from his Hollywood friends including Johnny Carson, host of The Tonight Show, and the entertainer Sammy Davis Jr. When General Motors refused to sell him the parts he needed, he sought help from European suppliers including Renault and Lotus.
His biggest fundraising coup came in 1978: wooing Britain’s Labour government into stumping up about £55 million ($116.7m) to build a car plant in the unemployment blackspot of Dunmurry, near Belfast. This was later topped up with more than £20m ($42m) by the Thatcher government. Ministers hoped to create 2,000 jobs and invigorate a region so divided that Protestant and Catholic workers had separate factory entrances. But DeLorean had misjudged the difficulties of developing a new car from scratch.
Sensational to behold, the DMC-12′s stainless steel body was designed by Giorgetto Giugiaro, the Italian genius who came up with the Volkswagen Golf, Lotus Esprit S1, BMW M1 and Maserati Spyder. But production began before teething problems were resolved. The first cars rolled off the line at Dunmurry in 1981 less than a year after the factory opened – and with them came a world of trouble.
The car was heavy and temperamental, it reached 0-60mph (96km/h) in about 10.5 seconds rather than the promised 8.5 seconds, and could not manage its claimed 130mph (209km/h) top speed. The alternator on early models couldn’t supply enough electricity for the car’s lights and instruments, let alone the 1.21 gigawatts needed for time travel.
The battery ran down leaving drivers stranded and the gull-wing doors had a tendency to jam, trapping occupants. DeLorean’s company collapsed into ignominious insolvency in 1982, but that was just the beginning of his fall from grace.
In a clumsy attempt to save his company that year, he was lured into becoming a middle man in a US$24m ($39m at the time) drug-smuggling plot devised by Jim Hoffman, a neighbour in an upmarket Californian suburb where DeLorean was living at the time. Hoffman was a convicted drug smuggler who, in exchange for leniency, had turned FBI informant. Unbeknown to DeLorean, Hoffman had read in the papers about the former’s business difficulties and had offered him up as a grand prize to his federal handlers.
With DMC on the verge of collapse, DeLorean agreed to meet members of what he thought was a drug gang in a suite in a hotel near Los Angeles International Airport. In fact, they were federal agents.
Videotapes, later broadcast on news networks across the world, showed the flamboyant entrepreneur toasting the deal with a glass of champagne. While a federal agent opened a briefcase of cocaine, DeLorean admired it and declared it “as good as gold”, adding, “Gold weighs more than this, for God’s sake.” He later claimed he had just been playing along, but the statement would haunt him for the rest of his life. Led away in handcuffs – the arrest was also caught on camera – he looked bewildered. The outcome of his 62-day trial seemed a foregone conclusion. But not for the first time he was saved by luck, charisma – and a good lawyer.
Among the evidence presented by the defence was an unexplained 47-minute gap in the federal audio recordings, during which DeLorean claimed he told Hoffman that he was unwilling to become involved in crime. During cross-examination one FBI agent admitted that he was aware that DeLorean did not want to participate in the drug deal. The Los Angeles jury found him not guilty, concluding that the troubled businessman was a victim of clear government entrapment.
Instead of being sent to prison for 67 years, as demanded by prosecutors, DeLorean walked free. His acquittal in August 1984 – exactly 40 years ago this month – came too late to save his car factory, which the UK government had closed on the day of his arrest on drugs charges in 1982. Nor was he able to restore his tarnished reputation. Asked outside the courtroom if he planned to resume his career in the auto industry, he quipped, “Would you buy a used car from me?”
When the UK government tried to get its money back, it emerged that during its bankrolling of DeLorean’s ill-fated project about US$18m ($29m) had been siphoned through offshore bank accounts and a Panamanian front company. DeLorean was accused of embezzling US$8.9m ($14.5m), while Colin Chapman, the former head of Lotus with whom DeLorean collaborated to build the DMC-12, was said to have stolen more than US$7.5m ($12.2m). Chapman died of a heart attack in 1982 before the full deceit came to light.
An attempt in 1992 by the UK attorney general to extradite DeLorean failed because it overran the statute of limitation, leading an English judge to remark he would have liked to sentence DeLorean for “barefaced, outrageous and massive fraud”. Only one defendant in the case, Fred Bushell, the accountant for Lotus Cars, was jailed, after pleading guilty to the fraud.
At least some of the missing loot was allegedly used by DeLorean to buy jewellery through a New York company called Citigold Inc. More of it was spent on property and personal expenses. Some remains unaccounted for – possibly still sitting in a Swiss vault.
In the late 1990s Arthur Andersen, the Chicago-based firm that audited DMC’s books, was forced to pay the UK government £20m ($42m) in compensation for failing to spot the hole in the accounts. The accountancy firm later collapsed amid a scandal over its questionable practices. DeLorean himself would almost certainly have been prosecuted had he not remained in the US, beyond British jurisdiction.
Kat DeLorean says the allegations against her father were unfair and remain unproven. “My research has led me to the belief that much of what happened had nothing to do with [Dad]. I believe the car situation had to do with Lotus and Chapman in Britain, and whatever was going on with Thatcher [Margaret Thatcher was prime minister when the DeLorean company fell into debt].”
Aside from her obvious filial loyalty, Kat’s assertions do have some legal basis. In 1986 a US federal court found DeLorean not guilty of charges that he had swindled his company’s backers, including the British government. The jury accepted DeLorean’s claim that the Panama money was a loan from Chapman. For the second time in two years he was fully exonerated – the first being his 1984 acquittal on drugs charges. Furthermore, according to Nick Sutton, a senior manager at DMC and author of The DeLorean Story, DeLorean repaid the UK receivers US$9.5m ($15.5m), more than enough to cover what he is alleged to have embezzled.
Today, his daughter puts the blame in the hands of big carmakers who refused to help her father, isolating him. Had the DMC-12 been built as he envisaged – with a better engine and functioning electrics – it would have established his company as a serious commercial rival to the auto giants, much as Tesla did years later.
If sales had taken off at the start, Kat says, her father in all probability would have been hailed a hero and the saviour of the Northern Ireland economy. Just before production halted at the Dunmurry plant, DeLorean made a twin-turbo model whose lightning-quick performance at last matched the car’s looks. As Doc Brown might have exclaimed: “Great Scott! When this baby hits 88 miles per hour, you’re gonna see some serious shit.”
Kat insists her father was a decent man who too easily trusted people and made mistakes. As evidence of his public-spiritedness, she points out that while working for the US auto industry he devoted himself to reducing emissions and pioneering the use of seatbelts to improve car safety. He was also a loving and devoted dad to her and her older brother, Zach, whom DeLorean and Ferrare adopted. “I like to joke that I was conceived at the same time as the DeLorean car. I was born in 1977, which technically is when the car was born,” Kat says. “Not many people really remember a whole lot from when they were four, five or six. I do remember – my father and I were very, very close so the memories that I have of him when I was very little are incredible. He would read to me every day – often The Lord of the Rings – sitting on his lap.”
Her parents divorced in 1985, Ferrare suing acrimoniously for settlement and immediately remarrying. Kat’s relationship with her mother – now in her mid-seventies – cooled but afterwards she continued to visit her dad and play cards “every night I was with him, to the point where the couch, when he gave it to me when I got my first apartment, had a worn spot. A big spot for his butt and a tiny spot for my butt.”
In 2002, after his lawyers sued for non-payment of legal fees, he was forced to sell the New Jersey farm where Kat recalls spending much of her childhood. The buyer was none other than Donald J Trump and the property in Bedminster is now a Trump golf course. “I was very attached to the farm,” Kat says. “It was my safe place, it was my happy place. The only thing I wanted as a child was to grow up in that house.”
When her father fell on hard times she says he protected her from seeing the austere conditions in which he was living in a cramped apartment in Morristown, 50km from Bedminster. “I never actually got to see it,” she says. “He wanted to make sure I didn’t know how bad it was for him. He would come to see me, instead of having me come to see him.”
Kat now shares her own farmhouse in Antrim, New Hampshire, with her husband, Jason Seymour, a computer systems engineer, a Great Dane and a collection of her father’s belongings, including his brown cowboy boots and the painting of the DMC-12 that hung behind him in his office and provided the backdrop for many promotional photos. “Fans send me DeLorean stuff all the time [and] I keep a few key things that are really cool and really important,” she says.
Demand from fans of the films and from car enthusiasts has persuaded Kat to give up her job as a computer engineer and devote herself to reviving her father’s dream through a new company called DNG – DeLorean Next Generation.
Kat hopes her reboot will be different from previous attempts because, rather than an entirely new car, it will be a conversion of an existing one: the Chevrolet Corvette. It will have gull-wing doors added and will even feature an (optional) dummy version of a flux capacitor, the device that enabled time travel. The car will cost about US$160,000 ($261,000) when it is launched next year, including the US$60,000 ($98,000) cost of the Corvette “donor car”. Time travel is not guaranteed, though it will almost certainly be rolled out in a cloud of dry ice. “In 2025 my father would have turned 100 years old and we’re hoping – we’re planning; I don’t want to say hope – to have the car available for then,” she says.
The DMC-12′s enduring popularity – and the current fashion for rejuvenated classics such as the Mini, the Fiat 500 and the Renault Alpine – have convinced Kat there is a healthy demand for her resurrected 2025 DeLorean, which will be powered by petrol rather than plutonium.
A separate, fully fledged DeLorean supercar – codenamed Project 42 because only 42 will be made – is also in the pipeline, she says, though that exists in little more than computer-generated form at this stage. “We plan to open up the opportunity for people who really want to see a car of their dreams realised and have enough money to pay,” Kat says.
She hopes it will have the kind of acceleration her father wanted and carry his initials – JDZ. The price is likely to be “north of US$1 million”.
She already has backers and customers and so far has fought off a legal challenge by the rival Texas-based car builder Stephen Wynne. In 2022 Wynne announced plans to build his own new DeLorean, an electric vehicle called the Alpha5, which is also due to be released next year.
Kat insists she is legally entitled to use her own name. “I am focused on what I’m doing and I’m paying my attorneys to worry about that for me,” she has said.
Scepticism about whether either car will actually roll off a production line is rife among fans. Producing an entirely new DeLorean is a taller order than making one based on a Corvette.
The rehabilitation of her father’s memory is her inspiration, she says. “He was just this phenomenal mind. I was able to sit next to him for most of my life and talk about the car industry constantly. Some of the things that he told me are just now being realised. Some of the visions that he had – for instance, the new Michelin tyre. I don’t know if you guys have seen this in the UK, but there’s a new tyre where there’s no air; it’s just bands of rubber. He actually patented the manufacturing process for that exact tyre back in the Eighties because he saw the potential of airless tyres. Not only that, he’s [the reason] why seatbelts are in cars today after he did a study on their effectiveness.”
His final years in Morristown were spent eking out a living selling DeLorean-themed watches. In 2000 Kat persuaded her father to visit a DeLorean auto show in Cleveland, Ohio, where he was moved to tears by the rapturous reception he received.
“He’d been so disconnected from the community and from everything. Then to see this room charged with all this love and admiration for him … I wanted him to get a grasp of just how influential he was in a positive way, still to this day, to people. It really showed him how much he was loved.”
His daughter claims his battles with lawyers and creditors hastened his decline – he was “sued into bankruptcy and to death”, she says. “I believe that the whole lawsuit actually ended up killing him.”
He died aged 80 in a New Jersey hospital in 2005 from complications following a stroke. His gravestone lies flat in a cemetery in Troy, Michigan, beside that of his mother, Katherine. A simple slab, it bears his name, birth and death dates, and an engraving of his gull-wing car.
Written by: Nick Rufford
© The Times of London