DeLorean Motor Company

~ the eulogy ~

The DeLorean Motor Company filed for bankruptcy on 26 October 1982. A week earlier the British government had announced it was closing the factory at Dunmurry, and within hours of that announcement the man whose name was on the building had been arrested in a hotel near Los Angeles airport, on camera, in a federal sting involving cocaine. He was acquitted in 1984 on entrapment grounds. The company got no such second look.

John Z. DeLorean had been the youngest division head at General Motors, the man behind the Pontiac GTO, and he left in 1973 while still on a track that pointed at the top of the building. He set up his own company on 24 October 1975 and spent four years looking for somebody to pay for a factory. The British government said yes, because the site on offer sat in West Belfast between a Catholic estate and a Protestant one, in the middle of the Troubles, and a plant that hired from both sides was worth a great deal of public money on its own terms.

The car was a Giugiaro design with unpainted stainless steel panels and doors that opened upward, and it was slower than it looked. The engine was a 2.85 liter V6 shared with Volvo and Peugeot, mounted behind the rear axle, and it made under 140 horsepower in American specification. None of this mattered to me directly. There was never a DeLorean dealer in Turkey, and there was never going to be one; the whole production run was aimed at American buyers, and the whole production run was smaller than a week of Tofaş output in Bursa. I met the car the way most of the world met it, as a prop.

~ the dossier ~

~ dunmurry ~

The factory was the point of the exercise for everyone except DeLorean. Northern Ireland in 1978 had unemployment that ran past twenty percent in the wrong neighborhoods, and the Labour government approved a package of grants and loans worth tens of millions of pounds to put a car plant on a green field at Dunmurry. The workforce came off the street with no automotive experience and built the cars anyway, which the engineers sent over from Lotus said was the least of the problems.

Production started in early 1981 with quality bad enough that cars were being reworked at the American ports before dealers would take them. By the end of 1981 the plant had made around 7,500 and the company had sold around 3,000. That gap is the whole story. Everything after February 1982 is a receiver walking through a building full of finished inventory nobody wanted at the price.

~ 19 october 1982 ~

The sting was the FBI's and it was recorded. DeLorean was filmed in a room at a hotel near LAX looking at a case of cocaine and saying it was better than gold, and the case against him looked closed until his lawyers made it about the government instead. The jury acquitted him in August 1984 on the grounds that agents had manufactured the crime around a desperate man they had picked out in advance.

By then there was nothing to acquit him back into. The plant had gone and the 2,500 jobs with it, along with over $100 million of investment. Consolidated International bought the remaining inventory and the half-finished cars, and about a hundred more DeLoreans were assembled out of the leftovers before Christmas 1982.

~ what the name does now ~

Back to the Future opened in July 1985, thirty-three months after the bankruptcy, and it turned a commercial failure into one of the most recognizable objects of the century. That is an unusual afterlife for a car company. Most of them get forgotten and the DeLorean got the opposite problem, where the car is a permanent fixture of popular culture and almost nobody can tell you what happened to the firm.

In 1995 a mechanic named Stephen Wynne registered a DeLorean Motor Company in Humble, Texas, bought up the parts stock and started servicing the surviving cars. It has no corporate descent from the company buried here, which has not stopped it from announcing new DeLoreans at intervals ever since. Roughly six thousand of the original nine thousand are still on the road somewhere, which for a car built by first-time workers in a doomed factory is a better survival rate than the company managed.

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