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Petrol? Where we’re going, we don’t need petrol.
The iconic DeLorean DMC-12 could be relaunched with electric power, according to the current owners of the brand.
In a blog post published overnight, the company explained legal challenges and environmental regulations had complicated the roll out of long-awaited petrol-powered replicas.
“We hoped to get into production by 2017 and get three to four years out of it before having to take on the engineering for a new powertrain (engine),” the blog post said.
“However, with [electric vehicles] becoming more mainstream, we’ve been considering switching to an all-electric future – it certainly makes for an easier path through [the] emissions maze which still looms large,” the post continued.
Immortalised as a time machine in the Back to the Future movie franchise, the DMC-12 was designed by Italian automotive icon Giorgetto Giugiaro in the late 1970s, and produced in Northern Ireland between 1981 and 1983.
MORE: DeLorean listed for sale in NSW with $88,000 price tag
A rear-mounted 2.85-litre V6 engine delivered an underwhelming 97kW/207Nm to the road via a five-speed manual transmission or three-speed automatic.
While aesthetically appealing, the DeLorean was widely written off as too heavy, slow, and unreliable – just 9000 examples were built before the company went bankrupt in a spectacular style, and was eventually acquired by the current owners in the 1990s.
Despite several high-profile attempts to revive the cult classic coupe, no official DeLoreans have been built since the company went under almost four decades ago.
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