How do the doors on the DeLorean DMC-12 stay open? Is the device used hydraulic, pneumatic, or what?
I also heard that if the battery went flat while you were sitting in it, you couldn’t open the doors from the inside. You couldn’t reach the outside door handle through the window either due to the gull wing design, so you were reduced to pathetically pleading passersby to let you out. Apparently the batteries used to go flat regularly as the alternator was too weak for all the electric doo-dads installed.
Anyone confirm?
Not sure about the actual door mechanism, but for the door locking I found this on the web:
From: http://labwww.csv.cmich.edu/luke/auto/delorean/repair/lockin.html
I have always loved the gullwing door look. I have never been in a car with gull wings, so I don’t know whether they are practical, but I have wanted a car with GullWings for a long time.
They’re not very practical. If you wanted to get in a tight parking spot, you obviously can’t open the door only a little and get out. I always wondered what you would do if you rolled the car and ended up on the roof. There is no way you could get the door open, and the door had that little mail slot of a window in it.
This site has a comment about how the doors work.
Actually, the doors are easier to open in a tight parking spot than a conventional door because they are hinged in the middle of the roof and swing upward, not outward. They need less than a foot of clearance to open.
What Jet Jaguar said. It was one of the few conveniences of the DeLorean.
I owned one for a time, inherited from Pops Mercotan. Looked cool as hell tooling around in it, then looked stupid as hell as it broke down every 300 miles or so with some sort of mechanical problem.
The stainless steel body was nice in the snowbelt; no rust. However, the frame was NOT stainless steel, and got eaten by road salt all too quickly.
The DeLorean was awesome! Everywhere you go, someone says, “Whooaaaa, Back To The Future!” And the doors? The doors are great. There was a time when I wanted Qadgop to hang on to it and give it to me when I turned 16. He basically said “Ha. No.” Eventually, I realized that an unreliable, flashy, difficult to repair car with no back seat was just a dumb idea.
Elfbabe, who drives the used Volvo selected by the infinitely wiser Mercotan elders
But Elfbabe, we do have that picture of you sitting on Rick Mears’ lap in our old DeLorean.
Ah - Ok. I’ve just got a garbled, half-remembered version of two stories - one, the door locking mechanism had a weird flaw and two, the car used Lucas electrics.
I have never seen one “in the flesh,” so to speak as they weren’t officially imported into Oz.