It was meant to be the future, stainless steel, gullwing doors, moral manufacturing. It was a concept that clashed with the greed and indulgence of the 1980s. Then the money disappeared, the factory closed, and the man behind it, John Z. DeLorean, went down in flames. Acquitted for his crimes or not, his name became shorthand for excess and ego. He was the executive who said screw the boardroom and built his own empire, only to watch it collapse under the same audacity that made it possible. By any rational measure, the DeLorean Motor Company died forty years ago.
And yet, on a California night, stainless steel glows under the street lamps of the Puente Hills Mall. The crowd counts down to 1:21 a.m., the time Marty McFly went back to 1955. Kids sit on shoulders. Phones rise in the air. The gullwings lift and people cheer as if they’ve seen proof that time can bend. What they’re really cheering for is a nostalgia so powerful it loops back on itself, rooted in the moment it first imprinted on everyone who saw it young.
The DeLorean’s second chance didn’t come from Detroit or Belfast, but from Hollywood. Back to the Future unwittingly transformed a corporate catastrophe into a monument of imagination. The real car was underpowered and heavy, the victim of hubris and bad timing. But in the hands of Robert Zemeckis and Bob Gale, it became something more permanent: a symbol of hope, of invention, of escape. The movie erased the wreckage and replaced it with a dream.
That dream is what drives people like Ian Hummel.
“I’ll never see a stock DeLorean and not stop,” Ian says. “Even after owning one for years, that feeling never goes away. I still love its pure form. The clean lines, the simplicity. But the Time Machine is its own thing entirely.”
His car is one of the most complete Time Machine replicas in the country, imperfect in all the right ways. Ian’s not the type to polish away the years. He builds and rebuilds out of obsession, chasing accuracy the way some people relentlessly chase horsepower.
He first saw Back to the Future in 1989 when he was seven. The film hit him the way it hits every kid who thinks cars are freedom, but for him, it stuck. When his daily driver was finally paid off, that childhood spark reconnected. He found a DeLorean that wasn’t pristine, because perfection wasn’t the goal. The plan from day one was to build a Time Machine.
“It’s one of those projects that never ends,” he says. “There’s always something on the list.”
The irony isn’t lost on him. The Time Machine outlived the real DeLorean because it was never bound by reality. In the film, Doc Brown builds it out of junkyard odds and ends. It’s absurd, but attainable, an invention that looks just plausible enough to believe in. “That’s what’s so good about it,” Ian says. “You can look at it and think, yeah, I recognize that part. It feels real.”
Ian’s DeLorean carries that same realism. It’s functional, imperfect, a little tired, alive. In his garage, stainless steel hums under fluorescent light. It smells of hot metal and ozone. He flips a switch and the rear deck lights flicker to life. For a moment, you understand why people still chase this fantasy.
Not far away, another kind of dream lives in black paint and KC lights. Carlos Recinos Jr. drives the Marty McFly Toyota 4x4, a faithful recreation of the truck that sat in the McFly family garage, Marty’s reward at the end of the film, the attainable version of the Time Machine.
“The smell is so 80s,” he says, laughing. “Even if you put a freshener in it, it still smells old. But it’s perfect that way.”
Where Ian’s car is about obsession and myth, Carlos’s truck is about optimism. The clean, square shape, the Goodyear tires, the lift kit, the KC lights... everything about it says possibility. In the film, it’s the symbol of a future worth fighting for, and in real life, it feels like that again. “It’s fun to drive through the canyon,” he says. “You almost expect Jennifer to be sitting next to you.”
The truck and the DeLorean couldn’t be more different, but they orbit the same sun. They represent the two halves of the fantasy: the attainable and the impossible. For Carlos, it’s about recreation. For Ian, it’s preservation, not just of a car, but of a feeling, something that inspires others. “The DeLorean isn’t just a car anymore,” Ian says. “It’s an idea. It’s freedom, creativity, imagination, all in one thing. Being out with it, you realize it means something different to everyone who sees it.”
That’s the strange beauty of the DeLorean’s story. In life, it failed because of human flaws. In fiction, it thrived because of them. John DeLorean’s arrogance, his belief that he could change everything, created something too ambitious for its time. The company died, but the car, by accident, by sheer narrative luck, became immortal.
Without Back to the Future, the DeLorean would be a trivia question, a stainless footnote in the long history of failed startups. But the movie gave it what John Z. couldn’t: context, purpose, and redemption. It became a car everyone recognizes, even if no one remembers why.
40 years later, at the Puente Hills Mall, that myth is alive. The crowd gathers where fiction once took place. It’s a strange kind of communion, not about horsepower or engineering, but about imagination. As the car rolls forward into the smoke, its taillights glow red through the haze. The crowd cheers, and for a moment, the world forgets bankruptcy, scandal, and failure.
For now, and forever, the DeLorean is exactly what it always wanted to be: the car of the future.
