Like many people my age I've loved the DeLorean DMC-12 since the tender age of eleven, right about the time the Back to the Future films came out. I can remember being blown away that such a cool car could have been made in the UK. That's the UK, home of the Austin Allego and Relient Robin! Who would have thought.
Back to the future, well to the present, and I finally decide to start making one of my childhood dreams a reality. I'd always presumed I'd need to win the lottery to own one of these iconic machines, but after doing my research it turns out they aren't as expensive as I once imagined. Don't get me wrong, they aren't cheap, but they are around the cost of an average family car, and this is a far from average motor.
In the UK you can expect to pay £18K for a reasonable examples, with good examples coming in at over £20K. That's because they come up for sale so rarely anywhere in the UK, and when they do they tend to be in reasonable condition. However, the US is a different matter. At any one time there will be a good few spread over the states. Many can be found on ebay, but not all. To find those other examples you need to turn to some specialist forums and sites.
In the UK there are two great sites for DeLorean owners and people thinking about taking the plunge. http://www.deloreans.co.uk and http://www.deloreaneurotec.co.uk/. Both are a great source for anything DeLorean related and the community is second to non on offering help and advice to anyone thinking of buying one of these classic cars.
In the states one of the best places for anything delorean related is http://www.dmctalk.org.
With information on anything to do with the mark, not to mention a similarly friendly and helpful crowd, it also offers a section just for cars being sold or sought.
Finally one of the best links has to be a facebook page created by a guy in the states looking for a DeLorean. http://www.facebook.com/DeloreansForSale On it you can find just about every car in the US up for sale. A truly amazing resource (thanks Dangermouse over on the www.deloreans.co.uk forum for pointing me in its direction). Its where I found what will hopefully be my car someday soon...
I think my experience was similar; wanted one of these cars since I was a child. I actually wrote 'own a DeLorean' as one of my three life goals in my school leavers yearbook. I spent many years afterwards driving awful 70s (and later 80s) bangers, which were all I could afford. A DeLorean seemed impossible - couldn't afford to buy one, couldn't afford the parts, had nowhere to store or work on it.
ReplyDeleteI guess I stopped thinking about it for a while, focused on my career, moved from Sheffield to London, worked a lot of overtime. Several years later I got to the point where I had a bank balance but no visible change in my life, and I suddenly thought 'why am I working so hard if there is nothing to show for it?'. I started thinking of DeLoreans again, and as luck would have it the stars were right and the impossible became possible; P J Grady were offering an almost from-scratch RHD rebuild at a surprisingly reasonable price, and DPI were about to put their Legend reproduction twin turbo engine on the market. My teenage scribble of what a 1984 supercar DeLorean could have been like now had a chance of becoming reality...
Anyway, I hope your car arrives safely and I'm sure you have a lot of fun with it when it does. Perhaps we'll meet at a DMC club event sometime.
I've actually been following your RHD build on www.deloreans.co.uk. Looks like a very nice car, and certainly a great way to get that "dream car". I'd would have loved to have had the chance to build a DeLorean, especially a RHD version, from scratch. However my budget just wouldn't stretch that far. Can't wait to see what your finished car looks like, not to mention what its like to drive, what with that turbo in it. P J Grady certainly know their stuff, so what ever happens it'll be aspecial car.
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