Originally published at: 40 years ago, this TV commercial introduced the DeLorean to stunned viewers | Boing Boing
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And 39 years ago this happened…
In October 1982, DeLorean was charged with cocaine trafficking after FBI informant James Hoffman solicited him as financier in a scheme to sell 220 lb (100 kg) of cocaine worth approximately $24 million.
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Yeah, not a good look, but didn’t he beat those charges? From Wikipedia:
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How were they “death trap gullwing doors”. Are all gullwing doors death traps? Tesla too? I would say a car with such a low car like the delorian is less likely to flip on its roof than a tesla in an accident.
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Nope, he did time in the big house. Ten years is what I remember…
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Can you cite a source for that claim? Everything that I’ve found says that he was found not guilty. His reputation was ruined and the DMC was bankrupt by the time his legal problems were over, but I’ve found nothing saying he went to jail, certainly not for 10 years.
Perhaps you’re confusing John Delorean with a different individual who was involved in that same case, who did receive a 10 year sentence after cooperating with the government:
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Yeah, I thought he never served time. His wiki doesn’t say he served time, but wiki isn’t always accurate. I did see this little bit:
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Dare I say it…? Other than the ‘Back to the Future’ looks, they sucked as, you know, an actual car.
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Watching this is just like having a flux capacitor.
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Yup. We’ve covered this.
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There was a tiny bowling alley near where I lived in the 1980s that almost always had a DeLorean parked out front. It had vanity plates that said: DEALER.
I was never certain if it belonged to a punster or someone in the cocaine distribution industry.
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Mercedes solved this problem on the their SLS supercar by installing explosive bolts in the door hinges with an emergency lever inside the cabin. Lamborghini just included a hammer in the glove box for the windshield glass of the Countach. Tesla gets a pass by having ‘regular’ front doors on the Model X.
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Time for an old joke:
How can you tell if a DeLorean passed you on the highway?
The white line is missing.
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Is nobody going to acknowledge that the doors are named after rats of the sky that shit on us!?
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That’s how I remembered it – a couple years later, in 9th grade, a friend & I speculated that if one of us ever got into real trouble, DeLorean’s lawyer could get us off the hook.
(By then I’d [temporarily] forgotten about Paul McCartney a few years earlier)
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Almost 20 comments in and no BTTF gifs yet?
For shame…
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the cybertruck was a manifestation of some 70’s designs
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