The stainless steel made it very heavy, and it was underpowered. That's kind of a joke in Back to the Future, getting to 88MPH is non-trivial.

Doc says the stainless steel bodywork is the reason he chose that car as time machine, when Marty is surprised to see it.

I don't care if the DeLorean is impractical. I think it's one of the classiest and timeless looking cars out there.

Still beats a refrigerator for time travel. (Yeah, that was the original plan for the film. Switching to a futuristic-looking car was definitely the right decision.)

Crappy as this car may be, it's still pretty awesome seeing a DeLorean in a real life situation. I literally saw a DL in a Wal-Mart parking lot three year ago, and geeked the hell out. The owner even had a Back to the Future reference on his license plate!

My boyfriend is obsessed with back to the future and we have seen 4/7 screen used deloreans.

Peterson museum in LA has a restored one on display, they also have a gold delorean and a few of the new concept designs.

We got to see the one in Universal Orlando that was just chilling out in the middle of the sidewalk for a long time, but that one has disappeared since COVID. We didn't even know this was a screen used one, we figured it was a replica cause people were walking up and touching it and stuff. Wild. Probably why it's gone now, too many people fucked with it and it has to be restored. It sat out in the Florida humid ass weather for years though and no rust.

Unfortunately 2 are in Japan in private collections, but I don't think anyone knows who owns them. 2 we saw were in a private collection, but the owners gave us a tour and we even got to sit in one of them (the other is the one they destroyed with the train). And the fiberglass one from 2 was destroyed so we will never see it :(

Not only it is stainless steel but also it was directionally sanded so it has a "brushed" finish. If you have scratched it you had to use a specific grit of sandpaper and directionally "rescratch" it to return the original look.

It was a sexy car though

By all accounts the DeLorean is a piece of shit. But the design screamed The Eighties. Back when we thought the future was a series of hard edges.

Only the outer body panels were stainless. The functionnal car was basically a lotus chassis and an under powered peugeot engine. Many claims were made when it was announced but the final product was literally just the shell with a different car underneath. And it ended up twice as expensive as what they planned.

Stainless steel doesn’t rust

The DeLorean was also one of the first self-driving cars.

You just pulled onto the road, and it would follow any white lines.

For those of you that don't know, the car was manufactured as cheap as possible so the owner could use them to traffic cocaine. The stainless steel was a design choice to make it easier to cut off parts of the car to retrieve the drugs. The Wikipedia states that the first prototypes were carbon fiber but supply chain issues caused the car to be too expensive. They basically made the cheapest thing passable as a drug mule, sold it for some crazy price, and packed drugs into it.

It also made them heavy and slow vehicles.

Put it with the big spoons, not the little spoons.

Coke. A lot better of coke..

https://delorean.com/

As a sports car, it was a piece of crap, my Kia Forte could beat it in a drag race. You can't beat that iconic design, however.