The news spread, first with an article on Fox News and then in media around the world. Jason was so excited about the new venture and proud of his wife’s ambition, that he made a public promise on the DNG Motors Instagram account. “REVEALED ON SEPTEMBER 13, 2023,” it said. an image of white text on a black background, with Jason’s caption: “DeLorean is back in the Motor City.” He had just committed them to building a car for the Detroit Auto Show. When Kat saw the post, she went crazy.
Shortly after, DeLorean Motor Company in Texas sent Kat a cease and desist, demanding that she stop using the DeLorean name for her planned car. She and Jason asked her attorney to send them a response asserting her rights and expressing her willingness to litigate, and they moved forward.
DeLorean Motor Company It sits in a squat building next to a tangle of freeways in suburban Houston; You pass some rough lots and fields, and then the 1980s emerge around a bend in the road, where a retro-looking DMC logo looms over a row of DMC-12s in the parking lot. You might even see a JIGAWAT license plate there. Inside the garage/warehouse is a series of disembodied doors with gull wings that evoke a flock of wounded birds. old covers of deloreans Magazines stare from the showroom frames.
This is the kingdom of Stephen Wynne, a Liverpool-born mechanic who has dedicated his life to the DeLorean automobile, to the point of taking his son Cameron to kindergarten in some DMC-12s that appeared in Return to the future. However, Wynne is less impressed with DeLorean as a man. “I have more respect for the team he put together,” he says. “All you hear about is John DeLorean and not the team, and that, to me, is not right.” John was, Wynne said, ahead of his time as an engineer. But: “He created the company and, you know, in the end he also killed it.”
It was Wynne who picked up the pieces, effectively securing a monopoly in the strange little market for DeLorean parts. This was not a decision about preserving someone else’s legacy; it was about securing his own future. “I felt that controlling my destiny, in the future, was having control of the parts,” he told me in the workshop as the tools crashed into the cars behind us. “If anyone was going to get it, I wanted it to be me.” He founded the new DeLorean Motor Company in 1995.
Wynne believes that the original buyers of the 1980s DeLorean were “enterprising, innovative people,” with something “a little different”: less interested in owning a really fast sports car than a piece of cultural history. (The original DeLorean did 0-60 in about 10.5 seconds, something my used Hyundai can easily beat.) “We think there is a lot more wealth in that market today,” Wynne says.
Over the years, Wynne and his team made several plans to serve this “modern nerd” market with new cars built primarily from original parts. But federal regulators were slow to relax rules that said these historic replicas had to meet current safety standards, so the revival of the DMC-12, with its lack of airbags, a third brake light and brakes anti-lockdown, for example, never happened. . Still, the company did a thriving business selling auto parts and servicing. He also made good money from the DeLorean brand, which he alternately licensed for clothing, video games, and the like, or jealously protected through cease-and-desist and lawsuits.