If Doc were a different Doctor, the answer would be, "Look! Monsters! Run! "
If that were true, he would have simply bypassed his own arbitrary trigger with some kind of a momentary push button switch, parked the Delorean under the clock tower in the first movie, hooked it up to the wires, and waited.
Instead, he concocts this crazy plan with a hook and a clock so that the car would be doing 88 when the lightning struck.
Gasoline doesn’t “save” well. It’s volatile, and it breaks down over time. It’s my understanding that it can start getting dodgy in as little as two or three months. Low temperatures might extend that a bit, and there are chemical additives that will extend the shelf life as well, though it’s unlikely Doc had access to those. Since he’d already been in the past for 8 months when he wrote the letter, the gas would likely have been too old to use even if he had saved it.
Couldn’t he have converted run the DeLorean on alcohol? Surely he could have made a distillery.
‘Arbitrary’ and ‘automatic’ aren’t the only options.
The thing no doubt needs to go 88 to work.
That doesn’t mean it’ll automatically transfer at 88. Given the amount of power the Flux Capacitor uses, having it trigger when the car hits the necessary speed, instead of bleeding juice while it waits, only makes sense.
They tried alcohol. It blew out the injector manifold (literally, which was admittedly a bit over the top)–probably because the stuff wasn’t pure enough. As for building a still of his own…
Shot. On. Monday.
For that matter, I always wondered if he couldn’t have just refined his own gasoline from crude oil.
Read my associate’s post above.
“Shot on Monday.”
“Well, I figured what the hell!”
Where does he get the oil from?
Why didn’t he just pay Tannen the $80
Would 1955 Doc know how to reprogram. a chip made in 1985 Japan?
Oil was already being drilled for in California’s Central Valley by the late 1800s.
I imagine it was partly a matter of saving face. Also in the scene where he saves Marty from being hanged at the courthouse, he basically tells Tannen to shove it, so at that point Tannen probably wouldn’t have been very receptive to a peacemaking gesture anyway.
Did they ever explain why the Mr Fusion was still able to power the time circuits, but not the hover system?
It’s not that it can’t power the hover system. Doc’s letter mentions that the lightning strike destroyed the flight circuitry as well as damaging the time circuits. He may have had the roughest reentry in the series, unless the conversion included some sort of emergency soft-landing mod.
One of the best shots in the entire trilogy is Doc’s thought processes on how he’s going to get the DeLorean up to 88, because it ends perfectly with the train appearing in the window behind him. It’s an ingenious, and unbelievably complicated, shot to achieve, and I love it.
We know why he chose the train, and once he fixed on that idea, and assessed their limited timeframe, it was their best option that he knew had good odds of working.
However, after they defeat Buford Tannen they no longer need to rush away, so they could’ve taken the time to come up with a better plan if they so wished. Evidence of this being Doc remaining behind and managing to build another time machine even while stuck in the 19th Century.
So here’s a question…could the Delorean time travel on a treadmill?
Wasn’t gasoline available at pharmacies in those days? I remember reading that it was sometimes used as an anti-lice treatment. It might not have sufficient octane, but you could add some alcohol to it and also, a few minutes of knocking isn’t necessarily going to make your engine blow up.
yep - since it was the speed of the drivetrain - it could be accomplished ‘sitting still’ - its wasn’t the wind over the vehicle that mattered.