Few movie cars are as instantly recognizable as the DeLorean DMC-12 from Back to the Future. With its stainless-steel body, gull-wing doors, and ridiculous collection of wires and gadgets, it looks less like a sports car and more like something that accidentally escaped from a science-fiction movie.
But the filmmakers didn’t start out planning to put Marty McFly in a DeLorean.
In fact, the time machine originally wasn’t even a car. The decision came relatively late in the movie’s development, but once Robert Zemeckis and Bob Gale figured out what they wanted, the DeLorean turned out to be almost perfect.
The Time Machine Was Originally A Refrigerator
The earliest versions of Back to the Future had a very different time machine.
Instead of a car, Doc Brown’s machine was built into an old refrigerator. The contraption had to be transported around on the back of a pickup truck, which made the setup considerably less convenient for a movie built around a teenager traveling through time.
Robert Zemeckis eventually looked at the screenplay from a director’s perspective and realized there was a much simpler solution: make the time machine mobile. Bob Gale has recalled that Zemeckis suggested Doc was smart enough to build the machine into a vehicle rather than something that had to be hauled around.
The change solved a major filmmaking problem. Instead of constantly figuring out how to move a giant time chamber, Marty could simply get in, hit 88 mph, and go. It also gave the movie something the refrigerator never could: a car that could become one of the story’s main characters.
The DeLorean Looked Like The Future
Once the filmmakers decided on a car, they needed something that could plausibly look futuristic to people in 1955. The DeLorean DMC-12 was an obvious candidate.
Its stainless-steel body and especially its gull-wing doors made it look unlike almost anything else on American roads in the 1980s. Robert Zemeckis later explained that the DeLorean was chosen because it was the car available at the time that had gull-wing doors and could look like a spaceship to someone in the 1950s.
That became an important part of the movie. When Marty arrives in 1955, the local Peabody family doesn’t immediately see a strange sports car. They mistake the futuristic-looking machine for something extraterrestrial.
The gull-wing doors essentially became part of the joke. Open them on the farm, and the DeLorean suddenly looks less like a car and more like a flying saucer that has landed in the wrong decade.
The DeLorean Was Also In The News
There was another reason the choice worked so well: John DeLorean and his company were already attracting enormous attention.
When Back to the Future was being developed, John DeLorean was involved in a highly publicized cocaine-trafficking case, while the DeLorean Motor Company itself had already collapsed. Bob Gale has said the DeLorean’s real-world circumstances helped make the car feel dangerous, unusual and countercultural to the filmmakers.
That made the DMC-12 an unusual choice compared with the typical Hollywood sports car. It wasn’t simply an expensive exotic from an established luxury brand. It was a relatively rare, futuristic-looking car attached to a failed automotive company whose founder was constantly in the news.
And that fit Doc Brown surprisingly well. The filmmakers wanted the time machine to look like something an eccentric inventor could have built in his garage. The official Back to the Future production notes say the artists were instructed to make the machine look homemade while incorporating the necessary reactor and equipment.
The production team then modified actual DeLoreans, adding the fictional hardware that turned the sports car into Doc’s time machine.
What Made The DeLorean Work So Well—Even If It Wasn’t The Original Plan
The DeLorean DMC-12 had several things going for it that made it ideal as a time machine in Back to the Future.
It was mobile: A car was much easier to use in the story than a refrigerator that needed to be transported.
It looked futuristic: The DMC-12’s design was already unusual in 1985.
The gull-wing doors sold the UFO joke: They helped convince 1955 characters that Marty had arrived in a spaceship.
It fit Doc Brown: The strange, unconventional car matched the eccentric inventor’s personality.
It was visually easy to transform: The production team could bolt fictional equipment onto the car and make it look like a homemade experiment.
It was already culturally interesting: John DeLorean’s public troubles made the car recognizable for reasons beyond its styling.
It gave the movie a memorable hero car: Once the DeLorean became the time machine, its appearance became inseparable from the story.
The production’s designers then pushed the idea much further. Ron Cobb created the basic exterior concept, while Michael Fink and Michael Scheffe helped turn the sketches into a functioning movie prop. Fink later recalled being given Cobb’s designs and adding details to make the machine practical to build.
Fans Have Their Own Theories About Why Doc Chose A DeLorean
Fans have been asking the same question for years: why did Doc Brown choose a DeLorean in the first place? A December 2025 discussion on r/BacktotheFuture specifically asked whether there was an in-universe reason for the choice, with commenters debating everything from the car’s stainless-steel body to its futuristic appearance.
The stainless-steel theory came up repeatedly. In the movie, Doc tells Marty that the DeLorean’s stainless-steel construction helps with “flux dispersal,” giving fans an explanation that at least sounds technical enough for Doc Brown. Redditors have continued to treat that line as the closest thing the movie gives to a canonical answer.
The DeLorean Was Almost Perfect For The Movie
The funny thing about the DeLorean is that Back to the Future didn’t choose it because it was the greatest sports car of its era. It wasn’t even the original time-machine concept.
It was chosen because the filmmakers needed a mobile machine that looked futuristic enough to fool someone from 1955. The DMC-12 checked both boxes better than almost anything else they could have used.
And once the production covered it in cables, vents, coils, lights, and the flux capacitor, the DeLorean became something completely different. The real DMC-12 was a short-lived sports car from a failed automaker. The movie transformed it into one of the most famous fictional cars ever built.
In other words, the DeLorean wasn’t just the time machine because it looked cool. It looked cool because it was the perfect car for the story the movie needed to tell.
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