Taylor: The competition over the DeLorean’s legacy heats up
August was a big month for the DeLorean car company’s legacy. Aug. 18 was a particularly big day on both ends of the country. On the West Coast, San Antonio-based DeLorean Motors Reimagined hosted a public launch of its Alpha5 concept car at the 70th Annual Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance auto show.
Also that day, in New Hampshire, Kathryn DeLorean, daughter of original founder John Z. DeLorean, proposed a separate and unaffiliated addition to the DeLorean lore. She is behind the DeLorean Legacy Project, an educational engineering center with plans to build a signature tribute car, the Model JZD, initially designed in 2020.
The former is a for-profit business, while the latter is a historical tribute and nonprofit educational project. Both are attempts to define what this car brand meant in the past and will mean in the future. What is DeLorean’s legacy?
Ever since its prominent role in the iconic Michael J. Fox-led “Back to the Future” movie franchise, the DeLorean brand has operated in a space between the past and future. Any DeLorean-related project must reckon with the seemingly incongruent notion that a car bearing that name is a 40-year-old throwback marketing itself as a blast into the future.
The DeLorean of our imagination embodies this paradox — a retro-futuristic manifestation.
The folks at DeLorean Motors Reimagined know this. The “5” in Alpha5, the prototype they debuted last week at Pebble Beach, builds on a fictitious history that the company devised of having imagined prior models — Alphas 2, 3 and 4 — in prior decades. It’s a cool made-up retconned legacy.
Their signature tagline — “The Future Was Never Promised” — to me sounds somewhat apologetic, as if anticipating and responding to a disappointed fan who objects to their vision of the future for DeLorean.
Unfortunately, or maybe inevitably, it’s proving hard to satisfy hardcore fans who want both retro and futuristic styling. So far, it’s gone over about as well as did Hayden Christiansen’s portrayal of Anakin Skywalker in the Star Wars prequels.
Delorean Motors Reimagined’s Instagram page contains relentless complaints and accusations about the Alpha5: that it’s not a real DeLorean, that it clearly reused a 2019 design for a concept car called the DaVinci, that it looks like a Tesla, and that it doesn’t honor the DeLorean’s design legacy. To satisfy your own schadenfreude, visit their social media.
At odds over IP
The most immediate challenge to Delorean Motors Reimagined’s business goals hit it a week before Pebble Beach. Southern California-based electric carmaker Karma Automotive sued the San Antonio company and its top executives, accusing them of stealing intellectual property and breaching nondisclosure agreements they signed as Karma employees in 2021. To have a future, they will need to address this past in court.
As one dives deeper into the obsessions of DeLorean fans online, questions of intellectual property rights and legitimacy get even more convoluted. By the time it publicly launched in 2022, DeLorean Motors Reimagined had become part of a joint venture with Delorean Motor Company of Texas, based in Humble. That company, led by Stephen Wynne, years ago staked its claim as the successor to John DeLorean’s bankrupted firm by buying DeLorean car parts and then acquiring rights to the name, logo and design through litigation.
Sally Baldwin DeLorean, John DeLorean’s fourth wife at the time of his death in 2005 and administrator of his estate, sued DeLorean Motor Company in 2014 alleging improper use of intellectual property and again in 2018. A settlement in 2018 — for an undisclosed amount — left DeLorean Motor Company in a strong position to claim rights to the DeLorean name, brand, imagery and logo, which it has shared as part of its joint venture with DeLorean Motors Reimagined.
The daughter and designer
Kathryn DeLorean, who believes her father’s widow cheated her out of proceeds from John DeLorean’s estate, has embarked on her own attempt to establish a DeLorean legacy by working with a fan-friendly designer.
In November and December 2020, freelance automobile designer Angel Guerra of Spain launched a COVID-era fantasy idea: A 2021 DeLorean tribute to the car’s 40th anniversary.
Guerra’s designs caught fire among DeLorean online superfans. As Guerra tells it, he shared his vision with Delorean Motor Company, as well as business plans for building a prototype within a year. When DeLorean Motor Company declined to pursue the idea, Guerra returned to his regular job working on European auto designs.
So Guerra was surprised to hear a few months later that the Humble-based company was pursuing a new futuristic electric car joint venture with DeLorean Motors Reimagined. Guerra said to me about the venture, formed a few months after he pitched to Wynne: “what a coincidence.”
Guerra subsequently joined forces with Kathryn DeLorean to offer a different chapter to the vehicle’s legacy. They hope students of design and engineering will learn from building his concept car, the Model JZD.
Guerra and Kathryn DeLorean have noted that the DeLorean Legacy Project is not affiliated with the two Texas companies bearing the DeLorean name — an acknowledgment that the joint venture has the rights to the relevant trademarks and is trying to build a new electric car company.
In launching her legacy project, Kathryn DeLorean stresses that she’s not competing commercially with the fledgling automakers: “I am a DeLorean. I’m making engineers, not engines.”
But while they won’t be competing in the automobile market, they seem to be squaring off in the marketplace of ideas to determine which will become part of the DeLorean’s legacy. Time and those who are emotionally invested in that legacy will tell whether either prevails.
Originally Posted by Malevy
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