Official: DeLorean returns with 300-mile Taycan rival for 2024

Although technical details remain thin on the ground, the design influence of the original car is clear.

The slim wraparound light bars at each end nod to the brand’s 1980s heritage, while the chunky louvres over the rear window, turbine-style wheels and gullwing doors are some of the defining features that have been taken from the DMC. In fact, the new car has been styled by Italdesign, the Italian design house run by Giorgietto Giugiaro, who penned the DMC.

“In Italy, they never really stopped designing DeLoreans, which was awesome,” de Vries revealed. Looking back at sketches in the firm’s archives, company bosses “found the saloon, discussions about the coupé, a city bus and an SUV,” he said. “You would never know the firm stopped building cars.”

Now, DeLorean aims to bring that hypothetical line-up into reality by branching out into other segments beyond the flagship coupé, targeting much higher production volumes for the more mainstream-friendly models on its roster.

Next up will be a sports coupé powered by a V8 engine, followed by a battery-electric saloon and finally – and most importantly, with DeLorean’s brand-building plan in mind – a premium sports SUV with a hydrogen-fulled powertrain.

“We need an SUV for volume”, de Vries said. “The business case is an SUV that will be launched very quickly after we launch our halo car, but we need that halo car first.”

To be previewed after the coupé’s Pebble Beach debut, this larger model will be sized to compete – predominantly in the US – with full-size luxury SUVs such as the BMW X7 and Cadillac Escalade but still with obvious stylistic links to the halo car. The SUV will take its power from a hydrogen powertrain because DeLorean is “not convinced that batteries are the end goal”.

Whether this will take the form of a fuel-cell electric system or a combustion engine remains to be seen, but de Vries was firm in his belief that “there’s no one road to Rome” when it comes to phasing out fossil fuels.

With its initial seed round of funding complete, DeLorean’s next funding round will be tied to an IPO, possibly in August. de Vries explained: “We will be a public company. We have to be. Building cars isn’t cheap, and you need lots of money to make it happen.”

Why DeLorean changed tack

The revival of DeLorean was initially planned to start with a series of continuation-style modernised DMCs, built in accordance with proposed changes to US legislation that would allow low-volume cars to bypass homologation laws.