You are only about 30 years too late to get in on the ground floor of the DeLorean Motor Company. For that you should consider yourself lucky. But that doesn’t mean we can’t fire up the way-back machine to a time when leisure suits made sense and a car company could (almost) be financed by cocaine.
The YouTube submitter labels this as a video from 1981, but we are going to assume that it was released around 1976 when the DeLorean concept car first debuted. By 1981 DeLorean was already starting production with a car quite different than the prototype, and so they probably did not want to promote a car they we not going to produce.
The consumer car came close to delivering the promises in the video. The production DMC 12 was not a double chassis on which fiberglass body panels were hung. But it was a double-Y chassis on which a fiberglass body rested and stainless steel panels were hung (think Lotus Esprit, which was a closely related cousin once Colin Chapman was done tweaking the DeLorean.)
This is almost a convincing sales video for perspective dealers. We just need to forgive the optimistic statements not backed by any facts as well as forget that the voice over guy pronounced the “t” in “Renault” when mentioning the engine source.
The clincher for us is at the end where the company is asking to lay out less than $100k in today’s dollars for company stock. There will be other investments such as buying parts and utilizing dealer resources, but it seems like getting a DeLorean franchise was downright cheap.
Of course the luxury of history tells us now that their sales ambition was a bit too overzealous. The video lays out a scenario of between 7,500 and 60,000 cars forced on dealers over two years. Unfortunately the Delorean Motor Company only produced around 8,000 total over its initial two-year run.
Still, now that there is a new electric version of the DeLorean on the horizon, the new venture may want to go back to all that “computer data” touted in the video (is that on 8″ floppy or reel-to-reel?) At the very least they may want to borrow this electronica soundtrack.
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