I think Delorean is synonymous with "Back to the Future" for those of us in our late 30's and 40's. No one really knew what the car was until that movie.
Nah, some of us that are older than that watched John Z. for a long time. He did create the GTO, the Firebird, and redid the Grand Prix while he was running GM's "we build excitement" division. Call him the father of the musclecar.
The DeLorean car was built in Northern Ireland with government loans, and a work force that had never built a car before. It never lived up to its hype, and didn't sell very well. And, they were very slow! 88mph? Downhill, with a tail wind, at the Bonneville Salt Flats, maybe.
Another similar story was the Bricklin SV-1. Malcolm Bricklin didn't create most of them, but he got them imported into the US. First was Subaru. Then, he got the Canadian government to put up the money to build a plant. Car and Driver actually wrote an article that there would be serious competition between the Vette and the SV-1.
After the Bricklin bankruptcy, he brought us the Yugo. Do you know why a Yugo has a heated rear window? So your hands would stay warm while you were pushing it.
He also got the Fiat X1/9s imported into the US. That worked out so well that Fiat completely left the US market, until they bought into Chrysler.
Since he lived in Scottsdale, the police department bought about 15 of them (orange), and decked them out as police cars. I guess they thought they would scare all the speeders with their "hot" cars.
Jim
