John Zachary DeLorean was indisputably a brilliant engineer. A flamboyant, aggressive business executive who burst out of the staid, yes-men culture of the 1950s, he would prove to be an early model of the modern American visionary—think Jobs, Bezos, Zuckerberg—who discarded convention in pursuit of a singular vision. In his case, that meant trying to create the greatest sports car the world had ever seen.
He also was accused of being a thief, a fraud, an embezzler and a brazen con man who fooled everyone he ever did business with, from celebrities to superpowers, bilking them out of millions of dollars in the process. DeLorean’s longtime attorney and staunch personal advocate Howard Weitzman told the Los Angeles Times after the carmaker’s death in 2005 that “John DeLorean had one of the most warped views of right and wrong” he had ever come across.
So how did the man behind America’s first muscle car become a figure with such a tortured legacy? Because much like the car he’s most famous for—the DMC-12, a cultural icon thanks to its featured role in the “Back to the Future” movies—he’s both celebrated for his sleek fantasy vision of the future, and widely mocked for his spectacular, and sordid, failures.
So how did the man behind America’s first muscle car become a figure with such a tortured legacy? Because much like the car he’s most famous for—the DMC-12, a cultural icon thanks to its featured role in the “Back to the Future” movies—he’s both celebrated for his sleek fantasy vision of the future, and widely mocked for his spectacular, and sordid, failures.
Early Start
The son of immigrant factory workers, John Zachary DeLorean was born on January 6, 1925, and grew up in a primarily working-class neighborhood on the east side of Detroit. His father, Zachary, was a union organizer and foundry worker at the Ford Motor Company. Drivetribe, an online community platform for auto enthusiasts, reported that his “poor English and problems with alcohol prevented him from ever progressing beyond the factory floor.”
John’s mother, Kathryn, worked for General Electric and tried to keep things together at home. Hemmings Daily reported that when things got particularly rough, she would whisk the boys away to her sister’s home in Los Angeles. It has been speculated that John developed a love for the California lifestyle during these escapes.
His education was interrupted by World War II (he served in the Army), but he eventually earned a master’s in automotive engineering and, later, an M.B.A. from the University of Michigan. He officially began his automotive career in 1952, joining the research and development team at the Packard Motor Car Company. Before long, he became a rising star in the company—and in the industry.
In 1956, DeLorean took a position at General Motors as an engineer at the Pontiac division. At the time, GM was the biggest company in the world and the place to be, but Pontiac struggled with its brand identity and wasn’t connecting with America’s youth—suddenly a huge new consumer force driving the country’s emerging car culture. Pontiac seemed to make only stuffy cars for older adults.
Pontiac was “really in trouble,” says J. Patrick Wright, author of On A Clear Day You Can See General Motors, the bestselling tell-all book about the auto giant. It was “like an old person’s division.”
“When DeLorean left,” he says, it “had become the third-best nameplate in the auto industry, right behind Chevy and Ford.”
While other GM executives focused on building stately automobiles that seemed to float down the street on a cloud, DeLorean had different plans. He wanted to replace those sedate rides with sportier vehicles, machines that embraced a youth culture more interested in going fast than being cozy. When Pete Estes took over the reins of Pontiac in 1961 and DeLorean was named the division’s chief engineer, he seized the opportunity by having his engineering team throw a big, 389-cubic-inch V8 engine from the full-size Pontiac Bonneville into the midsize Pontiac Tempest. The result was a maneuverable but brawny car with a racing-friendly surplus of power and torque.
DeLorean called it the Pontiac Tempest LeMans GTO, and it created a new category of automobile that would come to be known as the muscle car.
But GM had a strict mandate prohibiting its engineers from sticking big engines in smaller cars to make them go fast. So the top executives at GM would never have approved the GTO as conceived. As captured in Framing John DeLorean, a new film directed by Don Argott and Sheena Joyce and told in a documentary style with dramatic reenactments starring Alec Baldwin as DeLorean and a supporting cast of top Hollywood character actors, the engineer came up with a loophole—with Estes’ approval, of course—to justify the high-performance aspect of the car. Instead of selling the car as a stand-alone model, the larger engine would be offered as a $295 option package on the 1964 Tempest. GTO-equipped coupes started at $2,852; convertibles started at $3,081.
The GTO package was an instant hit. Orders poured in. GM went on to sell 32,450 GTOs in its first year in production.
For this blatant act of defiance, DeLorean was handsomely rewarded, leapfrogging in 1965 ahead of several promising engineers with more seniority to become the youngest general manager of Pontiac at age 40. Four years later, he was named the youngest manager of Chevrolet, and in 1972 he was made the head of GM’s North American car and truck operations.
Not only was DeLorean a great engineer, he cultivated a talent for marketing as well. He understood something other auto industry executives hadn’t yet grasped: Automobiles were just as much about style as they were about nuts and bolts. “None of these guys were paying attention to the fashion side,” Wright says. After DeLorean gave us the Firebird, his reputation took flight well beyond Detroit.
Before the GTO, DeLorean’s lifestyle had conformed to GM’s image of an executive: He kept his hair short and clean, wore conservative three-piece suits, was married and attended the right social functions. That all changed after the muscle car was born. Now he was a rock star—making the money of one and living the lifestyle. He started working out and wearing trendy clothes, and in 1968 he divorced his first wife, Elizabeth Higgins, after 14 years of marriage, to spend more time on the West Coast. There, he hobnobbed with Hollywood’s elite and dated models and actresses like Ursula Andress, Joey Heatherton and Tina Sinatra.
Full story: https://www.forbes.com/sites/chucktannert/2019/07/26/john-delorean-reinvented-the-dream-car-then-he-totaled-it/#1da68a4714ef
