Petrolicious, the creator of high-quality, original films and articles for classic car enthusiasts, has released its latest video featuring Ian Hummel’s DeLorean Time Machine.
Celebrating the inventions, personalities and aesthetics that spark a collective appetite for great automotive machinery, Petrolicious aims to inform, entertain and inspire its community of enthusiasts and capture the interest of those who have missed it.
Today Petrolicious picks up the story…
It should be the future, stainless steel, gullwing doors, moral manufacturing. It was a concept that clashed with the greed and indulgence of the 1980s. Then the money disappeared, the factory closed and the man behind it, John Z. DeLorean, went up in flames.
Whether he was acquitted of his crimes or not, his name became shorthand for excess and ego. He was the manager who said screw the boardroom and built his own empire, only to see it collapse under the same audacity that made it possible. Sensibly, the DeLorean Motor Company died forty years ago.
And yet on a California night, stainless steel glows beneath the streetlights of Puente Hills Mall. The crowd counts down to 1:21, the time when Marty McFly returns to 1955. Children sit on shoulders. Phones go up in the air. The Gullwings lift up and people cheer as if they have seen proof that time can change. What they’re really celebrating is a nostalgia so powerful that it falls back on itself, rooted in the moment it first imprinted itself on everyone who saw it young.
The DeLorean’s second chance came not from Detroit or Belfast, but from Hollywood. “Back to the Future” inadvertently turned a corporate disaster into a monument to the imagination. The real car was underpowered and heavy, the victim of hubris and bad timing. But in the hands of Robert Zemeckis and Bob Gale, it became something more enduring: a symbol of hope, of invention, of escape. The film erased the rubble and replaced it with a dream.
This dream drives people like Ian Hummel.
“I’ll never see a stock DeLorean and I won’t stop,” Ian says. “Even after owning a time machine for years, that feeling never goes away. I still love its pure form. The clean lines, the simplicity. But the time machine is its own thing.”
His car is one of the most complete replicas of a time machine in the country, imperfect in every way. Ian isn’t the type to burnish the years. He builds and rebuilds obsessively, striving for precision the way some people relentlessly pursue horsepower.
He first saw Back to the Future in 1989, when he was seven years old. The film hit him like it would any kid who thinks cars equal freedom, but for him it stuck. When his daily driver was finally paid off, the spark of his childhood was rekindled. He found a DeLorean that wasn’t flawless because perfection wasn’t the goal. The plan from day one was to build a time machine.
“It’s one of those projects that never ends,” he says. “There’s always something on the list.”
The irony is not lost on him. The time machine survived the real DeLorean because it was never tied to reality. In the film, Doc Brown puts it together out of scrapyard junk. It’s absurd but attainable, an invention that seems just plausible enough to believe in. “That’s the good thing about it,” says Ian. “You can look at it and think, yeah, I recognize that part. It feels real.”
Ian’s DeLorean exudes the same realism. It’s functional, imperfect, a little tired, alive. In his garage, stainless steel hums in the neon lights. It smells of hot metal and ozone. He flips a switch and the lights on the back deck flicker to life. For a moment, you understand why people still chase this fantasy.
Not far away, another kind of dream lives in black paint and KC lights. Carlos Recinos Jr. drives the Marty McFly Toyota 4×4, a full-scale replica of the truck that sat in the McFly family garage, Marty’s reward at the end of the film, the attainable version of the time machine.
“The smell is so 80s,” he says with a laugh. “Even if you put air freshener in it, it still smells old. But it’s perfect like this.”
While Ian’s car is about obsession and myth, Carlos’ truck is about optimism. The clean, square shape, the Goodyear tires, the lift kit, the KC lights… everything about it speaks of possibility. In the film it is the symbol of a future worth fighting for, and in real life it feels that way again. “It’s fun to drive through the gorge,” he says. “You almost expect Jennifer to sit next to you.”
The truck and the DeLorean couldn’t be more different, but they orbit the same sun. They represent the two halves of fantasy: the attainable and the impossible. For Carlos, it’s about recovery. For Ian, it’s not just about preserving a car, but also preserving a feeling, something that inspires others. “The DeLorean is no longer just a car,” says Ian. “It’s an idea. It’s freedom, creativity, imagination, all rolled into one. When you’re out there with it, you realize it means something different to everyone who sees it.”
That’s the strange beauty of the DeLorean story. Life failed because of human mistakes. Fiction flourished thanks to them. John DeLorean’s arrogance and belief in the ability to change everything created something that was too ambitious for the time. The company died, but the car became immortal through chance and sheer luck of storytelling.
Without Back to the Future, the DeLorean would be a trivial matter, a flawless footnote in the long history of failed startups. But the film gave him what John Z. couldn’t: context, purpose and redemption. It became a car that everyone recognizes, even if no one remembers why.
40 years later, that myth is alive and well at Puente Hills Mall. The crowd gathers where the fiction once took place. It’s a strange kind of community that’s not about horsepower or technology, but about imagination. As the car rolls forward into the smoke, its taillights glow red through the haze. The crowd cheers, and for a moment the world forgets bankruptcy, scandal and failure.
For now and forever, the DeLorean is exactly what it always wanted to be: the car of the future.
