There’s been some recent discussion in our BangShift forum are about DeLorean cars. I don’t have a whole lot of good stuff to say about them, but after watching this video, I can say that they fold up magically when involved in a crash at 40mph. We’re talking budget basement Chinese economy car levels of failure here. The big giant doors pop out allowing the roof to kink up and all that added mass in the back of the car where the engine and trans-axle live does its job to finish the destruction of the car. But hey, the body was stainless steel (complete with the plastic nose and bumper which are a completely different color than the stainless steel….WTF)!
We don’t get to see the car accelerating from a stop so it must have been cable towed up to 40-mph for the impact. Either that or the camera operator did not have a long enough lens to capture the starting point of the 40mph run as we know these things were packing some weak ass 130hp engine which Peugeot, Renault, and Volvo developed. Talk about the holy trinity of horsepower, eh! It would run to 60mph in 10.5 seconds as tested, which makes it slower than your neighbor’s mini-van. Ok, I’m done now.
Press play below to learn why you never want to crash a Delorean!
This gets me thinking, With out back to the future movies, would anyone care now about these cars?
I sense I may have stirred the hornet’s nest here…
You know, you mention that you like a car on the forum and next thing you know Brian has a video of one being smashed up on the main page. Coincidence?
Yeah. I seem to remember him finding one for a Mirada too. What the hell, Brian?!
He’s a little bitter =P
DAD GUM! Good thing Marty McFly hit that electric wire at EXACTLY EIGHTY-EIGHT MILES PER HOUR . . . .
That thing folds up worse than DeLorean’s wonder economy car (the Vega)
I guess that the Bricklin would probably win the “Useless Gullwing Door Cars of the ’70s and ’80s Smackdown.”
Looks like the delorean wasn’t much of a car, in many ways.
Here’s my favorite crash test though, German Engineering, with a bit of a load on at 45 miles an hour: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TPpU5azjCB8
I am rushing out to buy the first DeLorean I can find, parking it in my Sister Outlaws driveway with the keys in the ignition with a big bow on the roof with a card that says ” Just Because”.
something peculiar about the crumpling. did the stainless prcess prevent anodizing..something way silly going on there. There was a delorean in my neighborhood, drove by it every day on my paper route. not a weak car there at all…
People don’t buy the because they are cool, nor because they were fast. They buy them for their time traveling capabilities…duh.
I would like to know how it got up to 40 mph in the first place!
Am I the only one that sees a car “crumpling” exactly like a later model car is designed to do? The passenger tub stays intact, “crumpling” reduces forces on the occupants, if it were my opinion being asked, I’d say that car performs excellently in a crash – and sure is a heluva lot better than anything Ford or GM or Chrysler was putting out at the same time.
I can understand not liking some vehicles “just because” but consider being a little more realistic when it’s just plain old dislike versus trying to offer an engineering-related reason that seems… totally wrong, LOL.
And yeah, having sat in, tuned, and driven one, I find these cars unique, comfortable, ahead of their time ergonomically, and only lacking in the power department. But again, what was the competition bringing at the same time for the same price? not much.
Exactly what I was thinking. The front goes vertical, the passenger section stays whole, and as long as the engine didn’t make it into the compartment (I didn’t see it) then it did alright. Really, DeLoreans had two major faults:
1. No Power.
2. Poor electronics.
Fix those two and you’ve got a unique ride that always gets attention.
You guys are kidding, right? The passenger compartment gets mangled in this video. You would be seriously injured in a crash like that.
Scott Clark nailed it on the head. The car crumples perfectly as it was designed to do. It crumples and disperses the energy of the impact. If it did not crumple, it would’ve bounced back like a superball thrown at a wall. Seems to me there are a lot of biased people making angry & illogical comments for no reason other than hatred for the DeLorean.
…including the author of this article.