A Few Good Cars...

[Jonny Jones]

Good few years more for me unfortunately unless I come into some cash from somewhere... which won't happen haha! I saw Maddie yesterday as I was helping Stu with a filming gig, her interior was just stunning, first time id seen her upclose! It was my D hit for the day haha! But yeah im hoping they don't go up by much, I mean £500 is kinda forgiving.

[alexadams1]

A sort of related question...

The model DMC-12 related to the price of a D' being $12,000. Why did it end up being so much more?

Also, do you reckon that if the company made less D's (a year) it would have been more succesful?

[Guinney1971]

alot of things factored into the car costing more then initially envisaged - the pound/dollar rate, increased development & production costs etc.

I'm not sure if actual numbers produced would have reflected in the overall 'sucess' of the company.

[Chris Hawes]

The original prototype and DSV (DeLorean Safety Vehicle) from memory was supposed to be small and lightweight (probably not a million miles away from a larger Lotus Elise?). The car we know and love came about due to the fact that they needed to save time during the development and borrow heavily from the Espirit...

DeLorean had gone to Porsche originally but they wanted 4 years to develop the car. Lotus wanted more that the 2 years development time than DeLorean was offering but Lotus was cash strapped and couldn't refuse the 4 million being dangled in front of them.

The DMC-12 was supposed to be released in 1980 but due to a variety of delays plus inflation meant that the price needed to rise to around $26k?

DeLorean had to pay back the loans. He also made more £££ for every worker he hired so he could not have succeeded if he hadn't promised to make the quantities of cars that he needed to make.

Remember that the DeLorean was outselling the 911 initially but when the USA was hit by its worse winter for 30 years at the end of 1981 it killed sports cars sales overnight.... and the rest you know...

The above is from memory so let me know if I have any of the details wrong...

[Daniel Shane]

Abit off topic but it's funny how everyone say's that the Delorean chassis is like an Esprit's when infact it's more like a cross between the Esprit's and the Elan's.

Take a look at this :-

http://homepages.waymark.net/~bikechic/chassis.html

It's an Elan+2 Chassis and you can clearly see the Double Y chassis design very much like the D's

Now have a look at this :-

http://www.lotusespritworld.com/images/ ... hassis.jpg

And This

http://homepage2.nifty.com/essex/images/Pict00011.jpg

It's more of a Y and H chassis and the rear where the engine goes is tubular.

Dan

[Phil Peters]

I suspect that the project was perhaps not adequately budgeted for in the first place. The concept of 'the $12,000 DeLorean' rapidly disappeared when it came down to actually developing the car into a production-ready unit.

There were also unforseen expenses along the way, a prime example being that Giugiaro “freshened up” the shape of the DMC-12 when it was already 12 months into an 18 month development schedule. This of course meant that all the relevant tooling had to be re-made etc.

Then of course you have to factor in company expenses which also directly affected the success of the DMC-12 and DMCL, such as JZD's famous office suite "on the 43rd floor" in New York, Warren House in Belfast, the RHD project (which was essential at that time), the DeLorean Sedan, the Legend Twin Turbo project, the Transbus and – dare I mention it – GPD.

[neal]

Chris Hawes Wrote:The original prototype and DSV (DeLorean Safety Vehicle) from memory was supposed to be small and lightweight (probably not a million miles away from a larger Lotus Elise?). The car we know and love came about due to the fact that they needed to save time during the development and borrow heavily from the Espirit...

DeLorean had gone to Porsche originally but they wanted 4 years to develop the car. Lotus wanted more that the 2 years development time than DeLorean was offering but Lotus was cash strapped and couldn't refuse the 4 million being dangled in front of them.

The DMC-12 was supposed to be released in 1980 but due to a variety of delays plus inflation meant that the price needed to rise to around $26k?

DeLorean had to pay back the loans. He also made more £££ for every worker he hired so he could not have succeeded if he hadn't promised to make the quantities of cars that he needed to make.

Remember that the DeLorean was outselling the 911 initially but when the USA was hit by its worse winter for 30 years at the end of 1981 it killed sports cars sales overnight.... and the rest you know...

The above is from memory so let me know if I have any of the details wrong...

I could not have put it better myself.