Explore Cars›DeLorean DMC-12

DeLorean DMC-12

Overview

John DeLorean ran Pontiac at 40, the youngest division head General Motors had ever appointed, and he left the company to build a car with his own name on the tail. The DMC-12 is what arrived: brushed stainless steel panels over a fiberglass underbody, gullwing doors carried on torsion bars developed by Grumman Aerospace, and a 2.85-litre V6 slung out behind the rear axle. The 12 in the name was the price he meant to charge, $12,000. By the time the first car came off the line at Dunmurry outside Belfast on 21 January 1981, the sticker read about $25,000, more than half again what a new Corvette cost, and the 130 horsepower back there was never going to close that gap on a stopwatch. The factory lasted less than two years. Receivership came in February 1982, DeLorean was arrested that October, and the last cars were assembled from leftover parts by the firm that bought the receiver's stock. Somewhere around 9,000 were built. Then in 1985 a film needed a car a 1955 farmer could mistake for a spaceship, and the DMC-12 stopped being a failed business and became one of the most recognised shapes on the planet.

Distinctions

The defining attributes and collector status that make this car garage-worthy.

Legend

A car that transcended the hobby, known far beyond the people who drive them.

Poster Car

The car on the bedroom wall, the one people dreamed about before they could drive.

Octane Files Select

Renowned for its history, engineering, or cultural weight.

Collectibility scorecard

Rated 1 to 10 on the traits that matter for owning, driving, and holding on to a car like this.

Desirability

8/10

Rarity

6/10

Driving thrill

4/10

Investment trajectory

8/10

Usability

6/10

Ease of restoration

7/10

Cultural impact

10/10

Electronic dependence

Fully analogHeavily electronic

Fuel is metered mechanically. The Bosch K-Jetronic system uses an airflow sensor plate and a fuel distributor rather than an engine computer, so nothing on this car makes a decision about the engine electronically, and there is no drive-by-wire, no ABS, no traction control and no adaptive damping anywhere. What lifts it off the fully analog end is emissions-era closed-loop hardware plus an electrical architecture that runs on relays: a lambda sensor trims the mixture, and the lambda relay (owners call it the RPM relay) behind the passenger seat has to work or the car will not start at all. Add power windows, power locks, electric mirrors and a fan-fail module for the radiator fans, and it lands at 2: a mechanical car with a nervous system.

Market data

Demand tier, price trend, and typical values by condition. Our own assessment, not a quoted valuation.

Demand tier

EntrySolidHighBlue-chip

Strong, sustained collector demand. Good examples never wait long for a buyer.

Value trajectory

AppreciatingStableCooling

Values are climbing. The market wants more of these than exist.

Price by condition

Driver

$30k

Excellent

$47k

Concours

$80k

Hagerty puts an excellent DeLorean at an average of $46,300, up 7 percent in a year and 42 percent over three years, and the climb has been steady rather than speculative. classic.com's overall average of $64,168 sits well above that because it sweeps in restomods, time-machine replicas and low-mileage outliers; the same data records a floor of $24,200 for a tired 1982 car in October 2024 and a high of $243,000 in November 2021. Manual cars command a premium over automatics, and the gold-plated cars are a separate market worth several times a standard example. What supports the trajectory is demand that has nothing to do with how the car performs and everything to do with 1985.

Values as of August 2026.

Buyer's guide

What anyone seriously considering this car should know first.

Why it's worth it

The only production car John DeLorean's company ever built

Callout

The 12 in DMC-12 was the price it was meant to carry: $12,000

What to watch for

The body cannot rust, which is exactly why people stop looking. Underneath the stainless sits a steel backbone chassis with an epoxy coating, and that coating is the only thing between the frame and the weather. It gets chipped by stones, scraped on ramps and, most reliably, eaten by brake and clutch fluid dripping from the master cylinder reservoirs mounted directly above the thinner front section. That front extension is where rot starts, and it corrodes from the inside where nobody can see it, so get the car on a lift and get a DeLorean person under it. Then look at the panels where they meet things: edges, door frames, and the seams where stainless meets fiberglass are where corrosion actually shows. A painted car is a warning rather than a taste choice, and it sells for a good deal less. Work both doors half a dozen times and watch whether the torsion bar is carrying the weight or the gas strut is doing all the work alone. Ask for service records above all else, because DeLorean Motor Company's own guidance ranks recent documented work ahead of low mileage: a car that sat is a car with a varnished fuel tank and dead relays. Check the VIN too, since more than 1,000 1982 cars were given fresh 1983 VINs by the company that bought the receiver's stock.

The Story

Driving character

Nothing about the way a DeLorean drives matches the way it looks, and once you stop expecting otherwise it is a likeable car. The PRV V6 is a first-generation odd-fire engine, 90 degrees between the banks where a V6 wants 60, and it idles with a faint offbeat shuffle no amount of tuning removes. Fuel arrives through mechanical, continuous-flow Bosch injection, so the throttle is soft and honest rather than sharp. In US trim, 130 horsepower moves about 2,700 pounds to 60mph in roughly ten and a half seconds. What Lotus left behind is far better than those numbers. The backbone chassis and double-wishbone front end give a supple ride and steering that reports back, and the 35/65 weight split makes the nose light and the tail deliberate rather than nervous. It would rather cover 400 miles of motorway than chase anything. The gullwing doors need less side clearance than a conventional door, which is the party trick that actually earns its keep in a car park. The side glass opens only as a small hinged slot, because a gullwing door leaves nowhere for a full window to drop, and on a hot day you notice.

Design

Giugiaro drew the DMC-12 in the middle of his folded-paper period, and its direct ancestor is on record: the 1970 Porsche Tapiro, an Italdesign concept with the same hard wedge and gullwing doors over both cabin and engine bay. The DeLorean is that idea made producible. The panels are SS304 stainless in a brushed finish, the same grade a commercial kitchen is built from, and they are not structural. They bolt to a fiberglass body shell, so a damaged panel unbolts instead of being cut out, and light scratches come out with a Scotchbrite pad worked along the grain and never across it. Nothing is painted and almost nothing is chromed, which is why the car has aged so strangely well: there is no tired lacquer to give away the year. The louvred rear window and the dark bumper caps do most of the visual work at the back. The concept's costs show in the details. The sills are tall because the backbone chassis runs down the middle of the car, and getting in takes a technique nobody has yet made look graceful.

Motorsport pedigree

There isn't one, and there was never going to be. DeLorean Motor Company built a single model for under two years, never homologated it for a series, never entered a works car and never built a competition variant. The hardware explains why: an emissions-strangled 130-horsepower V6 designed for large French and Swedish saloons, in a 2,700-pound two-seater geared for motorway cruising. The car was sold on presence rather than lap times, and the company ran out of money long before anyone reached the part where you go racing. What competition history exists arrived decades later and belongs to individual owners rather than the marque, most visibly a DeLorean rebuilt around a supercharged BMW V8 that ran the drift support programme at the 2023 Dutch Grand Prix at Zandvoort. The racing credibility in this story belongs to a previous life anyway: John DeLorean made his name at Pontiac during the muscle era, and none of it transferred to the car that carried his own name. The only speed the DMC-12 is famous for is 88mph, and that was set on a film set in 1985.

In culture

Robert Zemeckis needed a time machine a 1955 farmer could plausibly mistake for a spaceship, and in 1985 the DeLorean was three years dead and looked like nothing else on the road. Doc Brown's explanation, that if you're going to build a time machine into a car you may as well do it with some style, and that the stainless steel construction helps the flux dispersal, gets cut off mid-sentence and has been argued over ever since. The hero car from the trilogy joined the National Historic Vehicle Register in 2021 as the 29th vehicle documented there, which places a permanent record of it in the Library of Congress. The films have kept it in front of every generation since. The Back to the Future pack arrived in Rocket League on 21 October 2015, the exact date Marty lands in Part II. Forza Motorsport 4 hands out an achievement called Outta Time for taking a DeLorean past 88mph. Gran Turismo 7 quietly puts a driver named E. Brown on the grid alongside one. Very few cars are recognised on sight by people who cannot name another car built in 1981.

Rivals

Cars from other manufacturers that competed for the same buyers when new.

Owning One

Why collectors want it

Two things drive this market and neither of them is performance. The first is that the generation who had the poster now has the money, and the DeLorean is the one 1980s car almost anyone can identify from a hundred yards away, in the dark, from behind. The second is that these are scarcer than their fame suggests: roughly 9,000 were built, and the owner-run DeLorean Census reckons about 4,500 survive in drivable or restorable condition. Hagerty puts an excellent car at an average of $46,300, up 7 percent in a year and 42 percent across three, which is a slope rather than a spike. The hierarchy inside the model is unusually flat, because DeLorean sold no trim levels at all. Value comes from condition, mileage and paperwork instead of option boxes, which makes this one of the few collector markets where a careful buyer can actually see what they are paying for. Manual cars carry a premium over automatics, unpainted original panels matter enormously, and the gold-plated cars built around the American Express promotion sit in their own universe several times above everything else.

Which one to look for

There are no trim levels to chase, and knowing that saves a great deal of time. A DeLorean buyer got two choices: grey or black interior, and a five-speed manual or a three-speed automatic. That is the entire options list. What varies is the build period. The earliest 1981 cars have twin grooves pressed into the hood and a separate flap over the fuel filler; mid-production keeps the grooves and drops the flap; late cars have a smooth hood and grey leather in place of black. Collectors like the grooved hood, drivers like the later cars, and the market barely separates them. Take the manual if you can find one, because 130 horsepower needs every advantage available and automatics ask a small discount at resale. The genuinely rare cars are two. The gold-plated American Express promotion offered a 24-karat car at $85,000 in the 1980 Christmas catalogue and sold exactly two, with a third assembled later from the spare panel set. And the factory-authorised right-hand-drive conversions carried out in England number somewhere between 16 and 23, depending on which registry you believe.

Factory-Authorised Right-Hand Drive

No right-hand-drive DeLorean was built at Dunmurry. Rather than pay for RHD underbody moulds and tooling, the company had completed left-hand-drive cars converted in England, most of them by Wooler-Hodec of Andover, with a second firm converting a small number by a different method (known among owners as the AXI cars).

Gold-Plated American Express Edition · 1981

American Express put a 24-karat gold-plated DMC-12 on the cover of its 1980 Christmas catalogue and offered up to 100 of them to Gold Card holders at $85,000 apiece. Mechanically a standard car: the gold plating simply replaced the usual brushed stainless on the exterior panels.

What owning one is like

A DeLorean punishes storage far more than it punishes use. The relay and fuse panel behind the passenger seat is the heart of the electrical system, and the lambda relay inside it fails when its electrolytic capacitor dries out, at which point the car simply will not start. Owners keep a spare in the glovebox, and a full relay-and-breaker update kit is a known, solved, inexpensive job. The window regulators are the other famous one, poor enough in design and materials that most surviving cars have had a motor apart at least once. The speedometer angle drive seizes for want of grease and takes the speedometer with it. Early 1981 cars carry an 80-amp Ducellier alternator that struggles once headlights, blower and radio are all working, and higher-output replacements are common. Cars that sat for years turn up with varnished fuel tanks and perished rubber throughout. Dashboards crack from the glovebox corners in cars that lived somewhere hot. None of it is exotic, all of it is documented in detail by a community that has been solving these same faults for forty years, and there is no bodywork rust to think about at all.

Upkeep & parts

The DeLorean has the strangest parts situation in the hobby: new old stock is easier to find for this car than for plenty of cars still in production. In 1997 Stephen Wynne bought the entire remaining factory parts inventory out of a warehouse in Columbus, Ohio, along with the tooling, engineering drawings and company records, and moved it to Houston in dozens of trailer loads. That inventory, plus decades of reproduction work built on top of it, is why a car built for under two years by a company that no longer exists still has a real catalogue behind it. The drivetrain helps too, since the PRV V6 and its Renault transaxle went into Volvos, Renaults and Peugeots by the hundred thousand, so ordinary service parts stay ordinary. Budget for the electrical refresh most cars want (relay and breaker update, window regulators, cooling fan wiring) and for frame work if a survey turns up failed epoxy. The DeLorean Owners Association has run since 1983 and publishes DeLorean World; DMCTalk is where most technical problems get diagnosed; specialists operate on both sides of the Atlantic. Nobody owning one of these is on their own.