DeLorean reunion to honor famous sports car
DETROIT -- In a personal trip back to the future, a couple of hundred veterans of DeLorean Motor Co.'s brief, intense existence will gather near the company's one-time factory in Northern Ireland in May for a 35th anniversary celebration.
The reunion will gather everyone from a former CEO to the man who painted lines on the factory floor – Joe Murray, who still proudly refers to himself as employee #65.
"The common denominator is that everyone considers it to be the best time of their working lives," said Barrie Wills, the former DMC purchasing director who became the company's third and final CEO.
"It was like going to a university to learn how to build a car," Wills said. "We went from a cow pasture outside Belfast to shipping cars to dealers in California in 28 months."
Unfortunately, DeLorean Motor went from that first shipment to having its assets auctioned off in bankruptcy in another 18 months. Still, the unique stainless steel car and the company and people who made it are an enduring source of fascination.
"So far as a lasting place in popular culture is concerned, the DeLorean has everything going for it," said Matt Anderson, transportation curator at the Henry Ford museum. "It's a novel car, with the stainless steel body and those gull-wing doors. It's tied to a charismatic individual in John Z. DeLorean. And it has a juicy scandal at the end. Still, I think the 'Back to the Future' films trump everything. Those movies are so beloved, and the car is nearly as big a star of them as Michael J. Fox and Christopher Lloyd."
High-flying former GM exec DeLorean harnessed an extraordinary amount of talent to build his dream car. The U.K. government agreed to finance a $120 million factory. Legendary engineering house Lotus developed the car. Giorgio Giugiaro's ItalDesign studio styled it. Companies across Europe and the United States supplied parts.
"The idea was good, but the timing was terrible," said automotive journalist John Lamm, author of "DeLorean: Stainless Steel Illusion." The first cars arrived in the United States as the country slipped into the devastating double-dip recession of 1981.
"We couldn't withstand it," Wills says. The company faltered, John Z. found himself facing money-laundering charges and everything fell apart. Wills calls it "the global auto industry's greatest ever near miss."
DMC built 9,080 cars, about 6,500 of which are probably still on the road.
The reunion, May 3-5, takes place at the Culloden Hotel in Belfast and will include a visit to the former DeLorean factory.
John Z. DeLorean was a cultural phenomenon in the 1960s and '70s, a Detroit-born maverick who rose to the top of GM, partied with movie stars and attracted media coverage like Tesla's Elon Musk does today.
DeLorean dressed like a playboy, squired beautiful women to Hollywood parties and married models. A pop culture hero, he clashed frequently with GM's hierarchy, despite a series of successes that included developing the Pontiac GTO and leading Chevrolet to record sales. He left GM and founded DeLorean Motor Co. in 1973 to build his gull-winged sports car in then-troubled Northern Ireland.
The late Donald Goldie, an associate director on the project, and his team made DeLorean's futuristic dream car a reality. They trimmed wood pieces within thousandths of an inch to produce models for the car's parts and body panels. They layered together strips of Philippine mahogany for the floor panel and carved cherry for the grille and other pieces that required fine detail.
"It blurred the lines between art and science," Goldie's son Scott, himself a scientist with the FDA, says.
The DeLorean project was unusual, Stockfish said. Visioneering made stainless-steel body panels based on the wood carvings and combined them with a chassis from Lotus and a European V6 to build the first functioning DMC for the presentation at the National Automobile Dealers Association convention.
Goldie was a hands-on supervisor, working closely with his team 14 hours a day on the second shift.
Like DeLorean, the DMC-12 was a publicity magnet, but the car fell far short of expectations.
Thanks to a dead battery, the prototype wouldn't start for the ceremonial unveiling at Visioneering. Goldie shook his head and went home to dinner with his family.
The DMC-12 and the parties DeLorean threw to announce it were hits with auto dealers, but the car's performance, production, and sales all fell short. The company ran into trouble fast.
DeLorean searched desperately for additional financing.
In October 1982, less than two years after he had delivered the first DMC-12 to a customer, the FBI arrested DeLorean in a cocaine-smuggling sting.
He was acquitted when his lawyers successfully argued the FBI had entrapped him with visions of drug profits to save his company, but DMC had collapsed into bankruptcy.
The car's greatest claim to fame would become its time-traveling role in the "Back to the Future" movies. DeLorean died in 2005.
Visioneering is still around. It makes production tooling for the aerospace industry today, still in the shops on Groesbeck Avenue where Goldie's team built the DMC-12 prototype. The company is getting ready to move to a new campus in Auburn Hills.
Donald Goldie's team remained close-knit. He and Virginia introduced several couples who eventually married. Some associates from those days attended his memorial this month.