Car Design Review 9: Troy Beetz, DeLorean

My past has been in product planning and product development for Nio, Lexus, Toyota, and Karma Automotive. But we’re also students of automotive design. We’ve launched cars before and it’s something we’re very passionate about.

When we talk with designers, our biggest concern is that they will, at some point, be ‘executing for technology’. For example, in the future we’ll have autonomous vehicles. But how much passion is there going to be in creating a bubble that takes you from here to there? We wanted to be very pure about our design and philosophy.

We knew early on we weren’t going to duplicate the DeLorean DMC-12. The biggest challenge we had initially wasn’t about the car, it was about the brand. We had a ton of focus groups at the beginning to understand what people were expecting. Many had this expectation that we were going to do another DMC-12 and were less focused on what the brand was like back in 1981. So the first step was understanding if they would accept the DeLorean brand and anything we built if their only focus was only on the Back to the Future film narrative? At the end, we said the foundation of the brand was to be rebellious. So that’s what we are.

Italdesign was not a shoo-in for the design work on the Alpha5 just because they had an association with DeLorean from the early 1970s and 1980s. We actually looked at three potential outside design teams. In doing so, we said we couldn’t just bring a car out after being absent for 40 years. So we decided to do a generational story and recreate a history to help create the DNA, which would become the Alpha5.

We looked at the 1990s and beyond – auto shows, concept cars, pop culture and technology. We gave the prospective teams our information and said, ‘Here is everything that should have influenced design from 1990 to 2024. We want you to recreate a history with what we’re giving you. What would DeLorean have looked like if it had continued to exist through that time?’ The other two firms wanted nothing to do with this challenge.

The collaboration with Italdesign was very much 50-50. It wasn’t them executing their own plan, or them executing our plan. Italdesign’s lead exterior designer, Dario Lauriola is 28 years old and it was a bonus to have someone with his lens, because he came in with a fresh set of eyes and had to reinterpret what 1990 was about for design. The designers also deliberately limited themselves to only use the design tools that would have been available in 1990.

We had a lot of hand sketches, a lot of hand-colouring and a lot of pastels. There weren’t all these digital tools and drag-coefficient software programmes back then. We have to take chances and risks. Others want to play it safe because they have a brand they need to fit into a box. But we’re not going to do it that way.