1981 DeLorean DMC-12: Real world review and road test

[Music] this is a DeLorean dmc-12 whether it's time-travel embezzled government grants or FBI cocaine stings it's famous for lots of things but least of all what it's actually like is a car so I'm gonna try and dispel some of the myths around it and describe what it's actually like to own and drive one first let's take a look around obvious place to start is the doors there hadn't been many other gullwing cars when the DeLorean was developed had been the Mercedes 300sl and the Bricklin but the technology required to actually open a door this heavy had it been developed to that point so DeLorean had to go to grow a narrow space to help manufacture cryogenically the torsion bar that lifts the door up and it was so complex that when DeLorean Motor Company Houston which is the modern version the company tried to remanufacture than 35 years later they couldn't actually find a company who was able to do it inside it's a two seater leather and electric windows as standard it'd be much better if it didn't have electric windows to be honest because they add weight and complexity to an already heavy and complex door but John DeLorean met a random businessman on a plane and he was convinced that any luxury car had to have electric windows so despite the engineering so he put it see of it he put them in and there you go behind the seats there's enough room for a set of golf clubs well that also means is that it pushed the engine back sufficiently far it became rear engined rather mid engines and much like an early 9/11 that means it can be without power steering glovebox here catch is out of a VW Scirocco ashtray at the Porsche 94 in fact one of the good things about trying to run one of these cars is the fact that most of the parts were offer the stuff that was kicking around at the time so the front brakes are off a Ford Cortina for example coming around to the business end the engine is a 2.8 v6 that's originally saw life in Peugeot's Renaud's and Volvo's of the era so things like the Renault 30 the Renault GTA the Volvo 760 the engine was kicking around all the way up until the Renault Laguna although by that point I had electronic fuel injection rather than a mechanical bosch k-jetronic it was called underpowered by the press at the time but that's mostly because the engine that went into the DeLorean was the federalized version of it which was detuned for the American market and to meet the American emissions requirements in federalized spec it put out 130 horsepower that's what the cars went all over to the states with but in European spec which is what this car is it puts that 160 when combined with a stainless free-flow exhaust so one of the rumors kicking around was that the other engine that was considered for the DeLorean was the v8 from the Porsche 98 that's not actually true the only other engine that was considered instead of the Renault unit which is what the DeLorean ended up with was the Alfa Romeo Busso v6 that would have sounded incredible but can you imagine trying to run a DeLorean with an early eighties Alfa engine so I've always loved the rear light design of a DeLorean but had the car of have been sold in the UK it would have had some really horrific units to fit whatever the legal requirements are at the time I don't really know what was wrong with these because you know they work just the same but there you go the other thing that's a little bit odd is that the stainless letters that spell DeLorean didn't come with the car either would you strange because the cuts out holes are there for them and it looks so much better with them in but they get so up front there is the boots it's quite shallow but you can fit a surprising amount of crap in here the strut brace is an extra no idea if it actually makes any improvements or knots underneath the carpets spare wheel well full of tools and up front we have where the jack should live but instead the essential piece of any plastic our ownership jump leads okay let's go for a drive and maybe let's address the first myth performance for DeLorean isn't may be quite the disaster that it was made out to be it ended up a little bit heavier than it was originally intended to be but it's still only about 12 70 kilos that's about the same as a BMW air and mini so with the stock hundred and thirty horsepower that the cars went to the states with that was good for about nine point five seconds to 60 in the manual a little bit slower in the auto and a top speed about 120 [Music] but in a euro-spec car like this which is what John DeLorean originally envisaged 160 horsepower and 173 foot-pounds of torque will get you to 60 in a smidgeon under 8 seconds and on to a top speed of 135 or so both of those I have actually verified the first and sansa pod racing DeLorean against DeLorean there and the second on the Autobahn with GPS by modern standards sure the hot hatch goes quicker but by the standards of the early 80s that wasn't actually that bad that was quicker than say a Maserati Merak and the BMW 635 CSI and not much slower than a Jaguar XJS and a Porsche 9th we had the company survived another year or so it's likely they'd have been able to get that twin turbo version to market this was being developed over in the States by a small engineering company called legends and prototype cars there were timed at five and a half seconds to 60 running 250 horsepower had they actually been able to get the twin turbo version to market it would be one of the fastest production cars on sale in the world [Music] and the company's intention had it survived would have been to shift pretty much all the production of a DeLorean to the twin-turbo model and phase out the naturally aspirated one however with 250 horsepower they might have also had to do a little bit of work the suspension and the handling so let's approach myth number two handling [Music] but with the ride because that's an easy one the rides actually pretty good on bumpy roads like this the car moves around a bit underneath you but it doesn't feel firm or harsh this cars riding on upgraded spax shocks which help but stop cars won't see bad either the downside obviously of the plush ride is body roll and the DeLorean certainly does have some of that but then again in the early 80s body roll was kind of an accepted part of trying if you look at road tests from the area you'll see cars leant right over even in manufacturers advertising you'd have cars with that high profile tires buckling under the rim and the body lurching to one side if you look at pictures of a 2cv they'd get it to 45 degrees steering it has been said that you don't so much steer a DeLorean as a mitt and there is some truth in that it's not the most accurate of racks what it does give you though is feel there's something that you get with a classic car and the way that the unpair assisted steering loads up under pressure that modern cars don't just give you it is a physical experience for sure the steering is pretty heavy the clutch is heavy the brakes are very heavily servo assisted so need a lot of attention but what you've put into it you also get back and that's one of the joys of driving a classic car and driving a classic car quickly is that it forces you to drive it well you can't really get away with throwing it into corners too fast you know letting the car sort out your mistakes because frankly it won't grip levels are pretty good it's just I draining now but despite driving the car fairly eagerly over the last eight or nine years certainly a couple of times have had the back step out on me and when it does it's been pretty easy to catch the car runs on two three fives at the back pretty fat tires for the time the gearbox is pretty good to the throws quite short although the ratios are quite long had the car made it to the UK then it would've had a shorter final drive ratio it is very much setup for maximum economy on the American freeways so although the car sits on a Lotus Esprit chassis which is a pretty good starting point it doesn't actually have the same suspension setup as the Esprit notably on the front you'd normally have a triangulated wishbone basically meaning that if this is your chassis here is your your wishbone on it held on in two places and what that means is that as you brake or as you turn or then you load on the suspension the wheel doesn't move about so much and the DeLorean unfortunately it's only mounted in one place and your lower control arm basically is fixed basically to the chassis of one point is a couple of bushes that wobble about under pressure and that means that your front wheels essentially go forwards and back when you're braking or whether you go for bumps which means that you get brake steer you get bump steer and it can get a bit squirrely under load there are a couple of things you can do to help with that there are some aftermarket support brackets that reinforce the area and reduce it but it's still in effect the other part of the problem is at the back you've got two rear trailing arms but the way that they were designed it means that as you basically load up one side as the cars rolling under pressure let's say 70 mile an hour motorway slip road as the car rolls introduces a little bit of towing like rear-wheel steering and the car starts to come round on you or it feels like it's about to come round on you it's quite unnerving you're not about to lose the back end but it feels like you might be so at speeds of up to kind of 7/10 or so the cars not too bad but push it much harder than that especially at high speeds and it takes a slightly firmer grip and steelier balls [Music] so rattling on through the myths myth 3 the car is now the practical or reliable well there's one way to test that and that is to go on a road trip this is now quarter to 5:00 in Manchester I need to be in Folkston by 10 o'clock let's see how practical it is for a trip to the Alps so inside the car here we have a set of 186 skis and snowboard inside that bag so that's taking up most the passenger seat behind that boot bag pillow for what I need to sleep through the Mike's I'm broken down and some food and a jacket so it's not it's sort of handling mist okay it would be difficult to do this trip with two people and the skis unless I were to have one of the amazing roof racks ago of the Louvre here but that does make opening louver and having access to the engine bay rather difficult one final check I will just do is to the fluids so particular the coolant to make sure that before I get onto the motorway we're doing okay let's have a look though that coolant looks okay oil I checked last night I think this is an engine that is good to go let's get in the car and get on the road so the first quirk of filling a door in is that the fuel filler is actually underneath the bonnet so you have to open the bonnet here's the fuel filler just had a go recording a snapchat getting into the car see look at it so much often happens at petrol stations it's done so on the reliability front there are a couple of things I can touch on to straight away let's have a look at the dashboard there's two things you'll notice well probably one thing you'll immediately notice and the first is that the speedo doesn't work this is standard because DeLoreans use an angle drive system to give you your speedo reading and what that means is that there's basically a piece of wire that spins around as fact that the wheels are rotating so you can imagine how fast and how often how much that thing spins around and that breaks what this means is that most lorian's don't have a working speedo and the other interesting thing about DeLorean Ryan bility is touched into the volt meter here one of the things that was slightly half-assed about the engineering of the DeLorean as it came out the factory was the rating of the alternator which meant that as you applied electrical load to the system what would happen would the alternator it wasn't powerful enough to power your lights and your radio and your fans and the air conditioning and actually keep the battery tops up the end result being that as you are driving along at night with these various electrical things on you'd be depleting the battery to the degree where you'd get home turn the car off come to the next morning and it wouldn't starflower battery stroke of genius fortunately on this car it's sorted but we can take a look at the voltage meter now and see what happens when we actually apply some electrical loads to it ok so here's I bought me two reading just above 13 volts let's turn on the headlights let's turn on the fan there it goes it's dropped down even more if I were to continue to add electrical load would see that dial go straight down the other thing that's important to remember when looking at reviewing any DeLorean is the condition it's in and indeed any classic car that's 37 years old it's not 37 years to fall apart and depending on how well the car's been kept it will drive badly or it will drive well I mean I've spent 10 years with this car taking it from being a hell of estates and through rolling and not so rolling restorations getting it to about as good as I can get it to be and no matter how much work you've done to the car you can't rule out one of the thousand things that makes the car tick doing something that you wouldn't expect and I think the other thing that's important to remember about the error that the DeLorean came from is that cars then I mean there's no getting around it you know you went into a dealer and asked for a sports car in 1981 Britain and you'd leave with a triumph tr7 possibly a Ford Capri or maybe if you were daring an Alfa suit and if you drove through a puddle on the way home the chassis would have fallen out by the time you parked it on your driveway you know if you like us bought a nice new Rover sd1 within months the children will live like peeled the back off the chairs and taken off the door handles because they'll just come off in your hands you know what maybe you've got an austin princess or a Morris marina you know caster of this era would just rubbish and when you judge the delorean against those suddenly the rubbish nests of the DeLorean is actually in context not that bad yes look at this guy this is an Austin maxi there he goes this is the kind of era of car was talking about with DeLorean and look he trusts his reliability so much he's got a spare wheel on his roof let's let's leave this maxi behind shall we one of the things that you do get a lot of in a DeLorean are people sitting on your rear quarters taking pictures I've got a van behind me right now he wants to come past there's a pretty good chance he's gonna sit there maybe giving me a thumbs up he was filming course he bloody was so the car has sent to be made it to the Eurotunnel and you can get a sense but just how low and wide edge relative to other cars when you see it in this kind of context it only just fits in the tracks the cars to come down so just put off of your tunnel finally driving on the right side of the roads for the car being left hand drive and car is still running pretty smoothly I don't want to jinx it but touch words we have got this far so three hundred and fifty miles in only about another fifty miles left tonight here we have it the premier class and it's time to go to bed let's see how she wants to start up from the cold morning pretty well so we're now about half an hour away from bed tuned heading down towards Rheem and there Troy got to forgive the French pronunciation they're doing about 90 miles an hour about just over 3,000 revs let's hope this continues and gets us down to Troy for lunch there we go a little bit of chaos [Music] so I made it to Troy in time to fill up with fuel which was another tank of 33 mpg which over 80 miles an hour is pretty good one small casualty though is the end off here the stainless letters fallen off so it would appear that I am now driving at Lauria so 750 miles into the trip I've got through Toni bit tanks of fuel I've averaged 30 to 33 miles per gallon at 85 miles an hour average the seats are really comfortable the ride is soft it's tall geared it's really quite a comfortable long distance companion so we have just had our first reliability failed the windscreen wiper on the left hand side has decided to deposit itself here this isn't ideal for function but on the plus side it did add that instant stop raining okay so I have now stopped but how do I open the door because if I open the door I don't want to know it's gonna be okay I can 2013 mil sockets done it a socket wrench words could be broken let's move the wiper back down to where it's supposed to be DeLorean might just have been pulled over on the hard shoulder with its hazards on but I am NOT going to class that as a breakdown so the light is fading but the roads are drying and emptying out and we're doing 4200 revs at the moment in fifth which is equivalent to about a hundred and ten miles an hour as you can hear the cars fine it's actually happy at this speed than it is at about 80 I think just due to the wheel balancing and everything else if only everywhere was drive straight embassy and smooth this car would be delightful so I don't want to count too many chickens just yet but we have just gone past mu TA and we're about to ascend a hill up its Maribel it shouldn't really be too much of a surprise but yet somehow it always is a little bit when you make it a very long way in a DeLorean does suggest though that this can be counted as a success on the reliability front let's talk a little bit about the myth of owning a DeLorean it's gonna be a bit of a nightmare hasn't it well actually not so much because you've got a Renault engine in gearbox a bunch of running gear from other cars of the year SME because it was too difficult too expensive too time-consuming to develop this complete specific parts for the whole car at the time and what specific parts you do have for the DeLorean are all pretty much still available because the company went bust halfway through a production run so there were still enough parts to build 3000 complete more cars and all of those parts are now owned by the DeLorean Motor Company in Houston and you could buy them all and they're not as expensive as you know parts for a contemporary ferrari 308 or porsche 90 way you mean if you need an indicator lens for a 308 you know good luck having much change from 500 quid present DeLorean it's probably the same well it is the same as the 104 Lada Niva so there you go 2 pounds 50 job done the car itself is pretty much like a Meccano set so working on it's quite straightforward yeah like any old car there are frustrations when it comes to trying to take it apart and you find that vaults have seized or you know you need to drill something out but that's going to be no difference on your MGB than it is to a DeLorean the car runs on the same sized tires is the Lotus Esprit and Jaguar XJS which you'd hope would mean they'd be easier to find nowadays but you're kind of limited to a couple of choices you've got general grabbers which are a modern SUV tire or you can pay 250 quid for a Pirelli P 600 first now go for the grabber is there a normal tire what you've also got is an incredibly active and social owners club in DeLorean club here at UK it's not just online with help and advice the club are also incredibly proactive not just about stocking parts but also developing replacement parts that are often better than the original whether it's ball joints or stainless steel door struts or stainless steel free flow exhaust systems so there's a huge amount of support now when it comes to owning DeLorean that there simply hasn't been at any point in the past there's actually never been a better time to own and run one [Music] we don't fight classic cars because they're objectively good in quantifiable categories we buy them because of how they make us feel and the DeLorean certainly makes you feel stuff I mean sometimes it's frequently anger but the smile it puts on the kid's face in the back window of a car passing me on the motorway waving at you cuz he's never seen one before the smile it puts on the guy's face he comes running up to the petrol station wanting a picture because he's never seen him before in his life either all of that stuff kind of makes owning it worthwhile so in conclusion are all the myths true well no not really but even if there were it wouldn't really matter it wouldn't make the car any less awesome

Channel: Gez Medinger

Views: 372,400

Keywords: DMC-12, DMC, DeLorean, PRV, V6, stainless, stainless steel, gull wing, gullwing, performance, handling, 0-60, top speed, review, road test, road trip, john delorean, lotus, colin chapman, renault, engine, fast, 1980s, reliability, practicality, owning, alps, meribel, drone, real world, best, exotic, ferrari, porsche, maserati, triumph, british, UK, volvo, delorean club, dcuk, time travel, back to the future, doc brown

Id: gzTe3dIfv-c

Length: 23min 9sec (1389 seconds)

Published: Sat May 05 2018