DELOREAN 40 Years of History That Never Happened

DELOREAN INVENTS A PAST TO GIVE ITSELF A PATH TO THE FUTURE

- AARON GOLD

Ask the DeLorean crew about their upcoming Alpha5 sports car, and they'll tell you it's the result of 40 years of ongoing evolution. But wait, didn't DeLorean go bankrupt in the mid-1980s? Of course it did-but the new DeLorean company has created an alternate timeline where it didn't. Along with the Alpha5, DeLorean imagined a complete history of what might have been, including three seminal DeLorean concept cars.

We realize this sounds like an exercise in corporate navel-gazing, but when Troy Beetz, DeLorean's chief brand officer, explained it to us, the logic made sense.

"We knew from the beginning that we couldn't just redo the DMC-12," Beetz said, referring to the original DeLorean production car. "The way we could make this brand legitimate was to suggest that the DMC-12 was a derivative of the DeLorean brand. And what is a DeLorean? What kind of company was it? We already had in mind what we were going to build, but there was no DNA to jump from the DMC-12 to the Alpha5. We had to reinvent the brand as if it were here for the last 40 years."

What DeLorean did was create a backstory-a fictional history of what could have happened in the 40 years since the DMC-12. The company did extensive research, looking at every auto show, every concept car, and pop culture trends of the 1990s, 2000s, and 2010s. "The work that went into creating the backstory was incredibly detailed," Beetz said.

Using the DeLorean DMC-24 concept more on that in a moment as a starting point, DeLorean worked with ItalDesign to create concept cars for the aforementioned decades. ItalDesign, as you may remember, penned the original DMC-12.

"We asked, 'What would DeLorean have done in those time periods to evolve the brand both design- and technology-wise?" Beetz said. "We weren't just exploring design language, but engineering and materials science, as well."