When announced in the mid-1970s, the car that would become the DMC DeLorean appeared to look decades into the future. From its gleaming paint-free stainless steel skin to its corrosion-proof plastic underbody to its (planned) Wankel power and safety-conscious airbags, the “ethical sports car” conceived by one-time Detroit wunderkind John DeLorean was to be like nothing else on the market. What launched in 1981 may have been a semi-hollow promise of the car’s real potential, but there’s no denying that the DMC DeLorean remains one of the most iconic automobiles of the 20th century.

The car DeLorean first showed the world in October 1976 was not the car that arrived at DMC dealers some five years later, indicating that the original design was, perhaps, a bit too advanced in its thinking. Plans to produce a chassis via a process called Elastic Reservoir Molding, for which DeLorean had purchased the patent from former Pontiac chief engineer Bill Collins, were scrapped, necessitating a time-consuming re-engineering process that involved Lotus’s Colin Chapman. The DeLorean that debuted in 1981 used a Vacuum Assist Resin Injection underbody bolted to a backbone chassis similar to the one used by Chapman in the earlier Lotus Esprit.

It is definitely an attention-getter, but is it a wise classic car investment?