How ‘Back to the Future’ Turned a Failed Sports Car Into a Pop Culture Icon

When the sleek, gull-winged DeLorean DMC-12 car first rolled off the assembly line in 1981, it looked like something out of the future—and just a few years later, that’s exactly where it was headed. Thanks to its starring role as Doc Brown’s time machine in the 1985 hit film Back to the Future, the techno-modern, stainless-steel sports car transcended its short-lived production run to become an enduring icon of 1980s pop culture.

With its bold beginnings and quick collapse, the DMC-12 embodied the boom-and-bust eighties. It was an era rife with risky financial bets gone spectacularly awry—from the imprisonment of junk bond king Michael Milken to the downfall of fraud-fueled energy giant Enron. The DeLorean Motor Company, itself a daring gamble, shut down by 1982 after building only around 9,000 units. Production delays, weak engine performance, poor sales and a scandal surrounding its founder, John DeLorean, all played a role.

Fast forward three years, when Back to the Future, the highest-grossing film of 1985, gave the car an unexpected second chance. By making the DMC-12 the centerpiece of a time-travel adventure with an ingenious, lightning-powered climax, the movie showed that even failed ideas, whether from a quirky inventor or a bold car executive, could be triumphantly revived. In a decade when image and branding—think yuppie excess, MTV flash and the flop of New Coke—often mattered more than substance, the DeLorean car’s Hollywood redemption seemed right at home.

With its nostalgia for the 1950s, Cold War anxiety (hello, stolen plutonium!) and theme of reinvention, Back to the Future captured the decade's push-pull between looking backward and charging ahead. The big-screen DeLorean, with its space-age design and nuclear-powered "flux capacitor," was more than just a time machine—it was the film’s central metaphor: a sleek vessel for the era’s belief that bold ideas could literally rewrite the future.

By 1973, John DeLorean was one of the most renowned executives in the American automobile industry. He’d worked his way up at Chrysler, Packard and General Motors. According to the New York Times, he looked destined to become the latter’s president. 

“John was seen as a rebel,” says author Matt Stone, who wrote DeLorean: The Rise, Fall and Second Acts of the DeLorean Motor Company. At the age of 40, DeLorean became the youngest division head in GM history. A bombastic self-promoter, he sported sideburns and chest-baring shirts, cultivated a playboy image and openly criticized his employer’s stifling bureaucracy. He palled around with celebrity friends like Johnny Carson and Sammy Davis Jr., who would later back his eponymous carmaking concern, DeLorean Motor Company. “I’m pretty sure he’d had enough of the higher-ups at General Motors,” says Stone. “He wanted to have a car out there with his name on it.”

While at GM, DeLorean knew companies across the world were building and engineering better cars than their American counterparts. “He wanted to engineer cars better, make them safer and with better fuel mileage,” says Stone. “He was really disturbed with the idea of planned obsolescence,” a business strategy where products are designed to stop working so consumers have to replace them.

DeLorean hired Italian car designer Giorgetto Giugiaro, who based his drawings for the DeLorean on a concept car he had created for Porsche. DeLorean insisted on a metal surface for the DMC-12 because, as The New York Times reported in 1982, he wanted to ensure his car wouldn’t “disintegrate five years after it rolled off the showroom floor.” Collaborating with three car manufacturers, Stone says, DeLorean equipped the car with unique features like a rear-mounted engine and huge pads near the dashboard for knee and leg protection. And the gull wing doors? He wanted those simply because he “thought that was just about the coolest thing he’d seen.” 

The first DeLorean rolled off the assembly line on January 21, 1981. After years of publicity and hype, anticipation ran high. “It was made for people who wanted a special car, but not a race car—the sort of people who bought Ferraris and Porsches,” says Stone. “This had tons of style, but you could take it on a long drive.” Reviews were mixed, though, with critics targeting the car’s lackluster engine and impractical chassis.

By the end of 1981, with America slipping into recession, the company had only sold 3,000 units. DeLorean originally planned to sell cars for $12,000. But the engineering, technology and use of stainless steel meant they first retailed for $25,000, before being raised to $29,825 in 1982, and then $34,000 in 1983, reports CNN. “It was a tough time to be building an expensive and limited-market sports car,” notes Stone.

In February 1982, the DeLorean Motor Company went into receivership. When DeLorean was arrested in October of that year on drug charges (that he successfully defended himself against), his reputation—and fortunes—plummeted further.

Then came the hit movie, which resurrected the business—at least for a time. Luckily for DeLorean, director Robert Zemeckis changed the time machine in the script from a laser-equipped refrigerator to something mobile, which would allow for more dynamic storytelling. (The team also reportedly worried about kids at home getting trapped inside their fridge.) The DeLorean, with its brushed stainless steel body and futuristic, angular design, had a sci-fi "look" that made it a believable time-travel machine, especially to the eyes of movie characters living in the 1950s.

Zemeckis treated the DMC-12 not just as a prop, but as a relatable supporting character—a finicky, charismatic machine central to the story. With its chronically unreliable electronics and underpowered engine (a wink to real-life criticisms of the car), it balked at key plot moments, like when protagonist Marty McFly flees terrorists in a mall parking lot, or during the dramatic lightning-strike countdown at the clocktower.

Behind the scenes, Hollywood artists kitted out the car, Frankenstein style, to make it a time machine. They fashioned a "nuclear reactor" in the back of the car from a Dodge Polara hubcap and a helicopter gas turbine engine. Inside, they packed with car with homemade-looking switches, wires, blinking lights and the bogus "time circuits," giving it a chaotically cluttered, but lovable, personality. And because the movie car famously had to hit 88 mph in order to time travel—and the DeLorean's speedometer didn't go past 85 mph—the crew created a fake one that went to 95.

These quirks weren’t just window dressing. They gave the DeLorean its personality, making audiences feel like they were watching a brilliant but fallible invention, not a soulless piece of computerized technology. It's that personality that made the car so iconic, spawning a bonanza of toys, memes, TV and movie references, a theme-park ride, annual fan meetups and more. The vehicle has become a DIY dreamer's machine, prompting thousands of wannabe Doc Browns to convert DMC-12s into movie-accurate replicas complete with flux capacitors, time circuits and even fog machines.

As for the real DeLoreans? The movie's halo effect has them selling for roughly between $40,000 and $80,000, depending on mileage, condition and modifications. “There are a lot of Back To The Future heads out there who bought DeLoreans because of it,” says Stone.