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Back to the Past (Part 5)
Bob Weinstein is a journalist who covers technology, project management, the workplace and career development.
It was no surprise that John DeLorean’s long-awaited sports car, the DeLorean DMC-12, wasn’t a better performance car, according to Karl Brauer, editor in chief of Edmunds.com, an online automotive information website based in Santa Monica, Calif.
“They say that image writes checks that don’t match a car’s drive train performance,” he says. “It was an attractive car that screamed ‘exotic’, but the body work was sloppy and it performed badly.”
In July 1981, Car and Driver magazine criticized the DMC-12 for being “abysmally short of any commercial standard of acceptability.” And Road & Track said, “It’s not a barn burner (with) a 0-60 mph time of 10.5 seconds. Frankly, that’s not quick for a sports/GT car in this price category.” The respected car magazine compared its acceleration with other sports cars popular at the time: “Corvette, 9.2 seconds; Porsche 944, 8.3; and Mazda RX-7, 9.7.”
“It was called the DMC-12, which made you think it had some kind of exotic drive train, but it only had a 170 horse power, 2.8 liter engine, which was not a very big engine to give it enough power to perform as a sports car,” says Brauer. He goes on to criticize the car’s performance specifications in great detail. “It was considered a…
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