Yahoo Autos What it's like to drive a DeLorean 42 years in the future
The only reasons we have the DeLorean DMC-12 to make a fuss over are stainless steel and Steven Spielberg asking, “What about the kids?” If one of those ingredients had been missing, John Z’s problem child would molder in dark anonymity with gull-winged cohorts of the era like the Bricklin SV-1 and Manta Montage.
Stainless steel kept the car from disintegrating into the same elemental powder that erased names like Escort, Cavalier, and Colt from the land more slowly than, but just as effectively as, a Thanos snap. Spielberg’s concern for child safety helped change the movie that made the DeLorean famous. Director Robert Zemeckis and co-writer Robert Gale finished the first draft of "Back to the Future" in February 1981, one month after the first production DMC-12 rolled off the Belfast line. In the first draft, which had its action taking place in 1982, Doc Brown had built a stationary, laser-based time machine he called a Power Converter that he couldn’t get to work. It was Marty McFly that accidentally made time travel an Oedipal threat to families everywhere by pouring Coca-Cola into the Power Converter while Doc was napping, bringing the time warp to life and sending McFly to 1952.
To return Marty to 1982, the 1952 Doc Brown built a 1952 version of the Power Converter inside a refrigerator of the era. Coke was a thing in 1952, but the early-post-war Doc didn’t use Coke nor a lightning strike for juice. He strapped the fridge to the back of an Army truck and had McFly drive that truck into ground zero of a 15-megaton atomic bomb test held in Atkins, Nevada, that year.
Even though the child-killing refrigerators with doors that could only be opened from the outside had been outlawed by the Refrigerator Safety Act of 1958, Spielberg worried that kids might climb inside a fridge after seeing the movie. By the time Zemeckis and Gale decided to make the time machine mobile, the DMC-12 had materialized, looking alien enough in 1982 that the 1950s farmer clan in the film could believably consider it a UFO.
So here we are 39 years after "BTTF" became the top grossing film of the year, and the DMC-12 still grips the imagination. The four-decade run is all the more fascinating because when we rented a 1981 DeLorean on Turo, we discovered it’s not all that pleasant to drive below time travel velocity.
The DeLorean’s primary issue is that it feels so much heavier than it is. The spec sheet puts the DMC-12 in line with the 1981 Nissan 280ZX, the Nissan more grand tourer at that point than the focused sports car it leaned toward in the 1970s. The DeLorean weighs about 2,745 pounds, roughly 150 pounds more than the Nissan. The DeLorean’s Peugeot-Renault-Volvo-sourced 2.85-liter V6 produced 130 horsepower and 153 pound-feet of torque. The Nissan’s 2.8-liter inline-six in naturally aspirated form made 138 hp and 149 lb-ft. However, unlike the Nissan, every urban driving aspect of the DeLorean is lugubrious and lazy, from the Gold’s Gym resistance of the pedals to the leisurely acceleration, coal barge steering, and aircraft carrier turning circle. In our notes, we wrote, “The steering, throttle pedal, and brake pedal are the heaviest controls I’ve ever used in any passenger vehicle, and that includes the Dodge Viper ACR.”
