From the vaults of CARmagazine: as DeLorean prepares for an all-electric comeback, we dust down Jason Barlow's 2005 investigation into what went wrong last time 👀
► An archive CAR feature from June 2005– John DeLorean, quoting a native American Indian saying
But we all talked about DeLorean. I didn’t know it at the time, but in 1981 the entire country was talking about DeLorean. The car looked like nothing on Earth, yet it was made in a factory not 20 miles from my house. This rocked my 10-year-old world. In Northern Ireland, unemployment in some areas reached 30 percent. Belfast, once an industrial powerhouse, saw its hinterlands laid low. Of course, the ‘Troubles’ didn’t help; in a society already deeply divided, what else were you going to do with your time? Easy to see, then, how John DeLorean would have been received in an atmosphere like this; as Messianic, armed with his mighty business plan, Californian tan and remarkable reputation. Okay, so he didn’t ride into town on a white charger.
At which point, the tale takes on a decidedly Shakespearean arc. DeLorean quickly got too big for his boots. Years later, in a never-before-broadcast 1996 television interview to which CAR magazine has gained exclusive access, he is uncharacteristically modest about his achievements at that time. In the 1996 interview, he’s rather more contrite. ‘I think my success was accidental. I was a talented engineer. I still am. In fact, I don’t think there’s a car running today that doesn’t have something I created. But I was lucky too.’
‘It’s the oldest car in Europe,’ Alistair says, ‘and amongst other things it was used as the original road test vehicle. You’re a bit late, but at least you’re here driving it now.’ It’s a unique experience, even if the finished car – an expedient mish-mash of other people’s parts, if we’re completely honest – bore little resemblance to the product its creator originally envisaged. It’s a shame indeed that in his desperation to get the thing to market, DeLorean compromised his vision so much.
Roy Mason, formerly a Barnsley miner and then Northern Ireland secretary, called it a ‘tremendous breakthrough’. DeLorean said that the plant would swiftly be producing 30,000 units a year, and that the car would be on sale in America within two years. Only one of them was telling the truth. The Belfast workforce might have erected the factory in a frankly astonishing time, and their commitment was never in question, but car assembly was haphazard. The doors often didn’t fit properly, and had to be manhandled into place. If owners did manage to get into their cars, they often couldn’t get out again. The battery, meanwhile, was too weak.
In the 1996 interview, he strenuously denies that he knew anything about the exact nature of the transaction, even as he sank further into a trap that unfolded over a four-month period. ‘When I said, “I don’t wanna go to California, I don’t want anything to do with you guys” [the government agent] said, “It’s too late for that buster, you come along or we’re gonna send your daughter’s head home in a bag.” So I was a total disaster. A basket case.
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