Crave
wants to see the return of the DeLorean, the flop 1980s sports car that acquired posthumous fame via the Back to the Future movie trilogy. It's hard to know where to start: the car's startling design, crafted from brushed steel and graced with gull-wing doors; the farce of its manufacture, subsidized by a British government desperate to bring jobs to the insurgency-prone economic pit of Northern Ireland; the underpowered lawnmower engine that made this fast-looking coupe not so fast; or the personal demise of supremo John DeLorean, the Detroit exec who risked an illustrious career on the thing.
The fact remains, however, that the DMC-12 was totally awesome and has, deservedly, built a nice cult around itself. Crave links to the reanimated DeLorean company itself, a Texas-based firm offering to put together a refurb for $42k, a little cheaper (in 2007 dollars) than the original, which retailed back in the day for about twenty grand. A private party sale in good condition typically seems to run about $25k, however, so that seems quite a markup—DeLorean fans often plop in modern Honda engines to spice up the ride, and even paint their cars to avoid having to maintain all that fingerprint-sensitive steel. Somehow, the idea of recoating a DeLorean strikes me as blasphemy.
What I really want is a new DeLorean. I'd whip out some specifications, but it really just amounts to a Lotus Elise in a modernized brushed metal, gull-wing body, so there you go.
