DeLorean

John Zachary DeLorean and the DeLorean Motor Company

John Zachary DeLorean was the eldest son of Romanian immigrants and was born on 6 January 1925 in Detroit Michigan. His father was a factory worker at the Ford plant and DeLorean grew up on Detroit's east side during the Depression. Earning an engineering degree at the Lawrence Institute of Technology and, later, a couple of master's degrees in engineering and business, he worked for Chrysler and Packard Motor Car Company before moving to General Motors, where he made his mark in the early Sixties by creating the famous Pontiac GTO. The GTO was immensely popular with young drivers, and nearly 250,000 of the fast and classy "hot rods" were sold in the first five years of production. Pontiac's sales tripled, and before long DeLorean was in charge of North American operations, bringing home a $650,000 annual salary. DeLorean, however, had a dream to start his own car company and create an 'ethical' sports car incorporating new technologies and safety features such as airbags.

Initially, the DeLorean car plant was to be built in Puerto Rico. However, the Northern Ireland Development Corporation and the Labour Government of Jim Callaghan heard about the project and offered DeLorean a package of loans and grants to build his factory in Belfast. This was in addition to DeLorean's own money and that of dealers and investors back in the USA. This was all going on at the height of 'the troubles' and would secure around 2000 jobs for local people, Catholic and Protestant, many who hadn't had a job for years.

The car was designed by Giorgetto Giugiaro of Ital Design in Italy. Other designs by him include the VW Scirocco (1974) & Maserati 3200GT (1998) to name but a fraction of his work over the years. The first prototype DMC-12 was up and running by the end of 1976 and prototype 2 was well on the way to completion.

The factory was built on a brown field site in Dunmurray on the outskirts of Belfast and the first cars started rolling off the state of the art production line in the spring of 1981. Initially, development work on the car was scheduled to be carried out by Porsche, however they wanted a 4 year timescale to do the work. The British Government wanted the car in production in 18mths, so Colin Chapman and the team at Lotus, in need of cash themselves, stepped forward. Unfortunately many of DeLorean's visions of his car were cast aside during development. The original plan was to build the substructure of the vehicle using a process called Electric Reservoir Moulding. However, with the pressure on to get the car into production, it ended up with a version of the Lotus 'Y-Backbone' steel frame and a fibreglass body tub which came in 2 parts and was 'stapled' together. In the end, the only real part of DeLorean's design that made it onto the production DMC-12 were the V6 engine, stainless steel body panels and gull-wing doors.

The Factory	The Test Track
Assembly Line	Cutaway