This is a neon DeLorean sign that features the company’s famous logo front and center. It measures in at 6′ wide by almost 2′ tall, it weighs 75 lbs, and it’s the style of sign that would have been hung from outside DeLorean dealers in-period.
The story of the DeLorean Motor Company now lives on in infamy, it’s one of the most fascinating automotive tales from the time, featuring a charismatic founder, a world class car designer, a multiple-Formula 1 World Championship winning engineer, and towards the end, a private jet full of cocaine and FBI agents.
Here we see John DeLorean himself in the early days of the company, with one of the first DeLorean full-scale models. The final production car would look similar to this but feature a number of changes. Image courtesy of the DeLorean Motor Co.
DeLorean originally started out with the best intentions of producing an incredibly safe and advanced car by the standards of the mid-1970s, with an airbag, 10-mph bumpers, a lightweight rotary engine, and an elastic reservoir moulding (ERM) unibody.
None of these features would make it onto the final production car, all victims of the harsh realities of mass-production and various engineering limitations. The final car would feature a steel backbone chassis and fiberglass body developed by Colin Chapman and his team at Lotus, all topped with stainless steel panels.
Power was provided by a 2.85 liter V6 which was mounted behind the driver and passenger, sending power to the rear wheels via a 5-speed manual or 3-speed automatic transmission. Performance was somewhat lacking due to the fact that the engine was only good for 130 bhp, though turbocharged versions with considerably more power were planned.
Ultimately DeLorean would cease operations in 1983 and that likely would have been the end of the story, with the DMC-12 being remembered much like the earlier Bricklin SV-1. It would have been the end of the story that is, if it wasn’t for a film trilogy called Back to the Future which debuted part one in 1985, featuring a DeLorean prominently as a time machine.
Back to the Future made the DeLorean a globally-famous icon, but it all came a little too late to save the company. We can only wonder what might have happened if the film had debuted before DeLorean went under, as the demand for cars may very well have kept it alive, for a time at least.
Above Video: This documentary by Cold Fusion is free, and it does a great job of telling the remarkable story of the DeLorean in just 21 minutes.
The DeLorean sign you see here is powered by standard 120 volt electrics and as noted above it’s quite large, measuring in at 6 feet long by almost 2 feet high. The reason it’s in such good condition is because it’s not an original from the 1980s, it’s a more modern recreation that’s ideally suited to a DeLorean owner or enthusiast.
The sign is currently being offered for sale out of Hanson, Massachusetts on Bring a Trailer with no reserve price, and it comes in a protective wooden shipping crate to make transportation nice and easy. If you’d like to read more about it or register to bid you can visit the listing here.
Images courtesy of Bring a Trailer
Articles that Ben has written have been covered on CNN, Popular Mechanics, Smithsonian Magazine, Road & Track Magazine, the official Pinterest blog, the official eBay Motors blog, BuzzFeed, Autoweek Magazine, Wired Magazine, Autoblog, Gear Patrol, Jalopnik, The Verge, and many more.
Silodrome was founded by Ben back in 2010, in the years since the site has grown to become a world leader in the alternative and vintage motoring sector, with well over a million monthly readers from around the world and many hundreds of thousands of followers on social media.
