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DeLorean Motor Company Says New ‘Back To The Future’ Cars Are Coming In May 2017

By Anne Sewell
Published on: 02:04 PST, Jun 10, 2016

Back to the Future fans, rejoice! The DeLorean Motor Company is reportedly pushing ahead with its plans to revive the iconic car, best known in the 1980s sci-fi film franchise.

The company has recently released new details about the improvements to be made to the car prior to the start of production in April or May of 2017.

In the enormously popular sci-fi films of the Back to the Future franchise, the featured car was the DMC-12, a car made from stainless steel with gull wing doors, that starred as Doc Brown’s time machine. The film franchise assured that the DeLorean car would become one of the most memorable vehicles of the 20th century.

However, despite the popular films, the car didn’t sell well and the DeLorean Motor Company ended up going into receivership in 1982. At that time, the U.K. government reportedly seized the factory in Northern Ireland.

Not to be outdone, and because fans of the film loved the car so much, in 1995, a Liverpool-born mechanic by the name of Stephen Wynne started his own company, also called the DeLorean Motor Company (DMC) but this time based in Texas. The company’s purpose was primarily to refurbish the cold DMC-12 cars with new parts, bringing them back to life.

Reportedly, these days, many of those cars are now in private collections or are owned by film memorabilia companies that exhibit the famous DeLorean car at comic conventions.

However, as reported by the Inquisitr some four months ago, DMC is now planning to make a brand new version of the DMC-12, originally invented by John DeLorean. However, while the new cars will look similar to the Doc’s original time-traveling vehicle, they will feature more modern car technologies.

James Espey, DMC vice president, told MLive that the new DeLorean car will have an engine twice as powerful as the original 138-horsepower Peugeot-Renault-Volvo V6.

While the car still won’t really be able to travel in time, it will also be much lighter and from the outside, will look almost identical to its Back to the Future predecessor.

There is currently one problem, in that the engine of the new DeLorean must fulfill low emissions certification requirements, and reportedly, the only engine that would work is made by General Motors but is too big to fit in the DMC-12. Reportedly, the company is currently in consultation with around three other unspecified manufacturers that are trying to get their engines suitably certified.

The next problem was the wheel size. Reportedly, it is no longer possible to get performance tires in the 14-inch and 15-inch sizes used by the original DMC-12, so the car will have 17-inch and 18-inch wheels instead. Reportedly, this will also make it easier for better brakes to be incorporated into the design.

DMC is also planning to make improvements to the car’s electrical system and chassis and will be outfitting the vehicle with state of the art technology for in-car entertainment. There will also be other fancy features, like seats that can be either heated or cooled.

According to Espey, fans in the U.S. shouldn’t get too excited yet. He said that DMC had confirmed most of its suppliers but is still waiting for U.S. federal regulators to push through the necessary legislation to allow small companies to build up to 325 car replicas a year.

As reported by the International Business Times, until that happens, DMC will export the new Back to the Future-like cars to foreign markets, but reportedly, they are only initially planning on building a maximum of 50 cars per year. The price involved has not yet been released but is likely to be in the region of $100,000 per car.

[Image via Wikimedia Commons by Nicholas Gemini, cropped and resized/CC BY-SA 4.0]

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