The Struggle is Real: My Journey with the DeLorean

I'll admit it, I was miserable driving this thing at any speed. The tires seemed to just tolerate the driving experience without any enthusiasm whatsoever. I had to spend a lot of money, not a little, to fix this weird machine out with parts and labor. I spent another $5,600 on repairs, which put my total investment in this DeLorean at nearly $24,000. That's a lot considering where I started. However, when you look at cars for sale online, such as those listed on Autotrader.com, it's clear that I got a good deal. Cars similar to mine are going for upwards of $36,000.

Justifying Ways to Spend Way Too Much Money

When it comes to justifying ways to spend way too much money, I'm guilty as charged. Let's take a look at the new garage that's being built in my backyard. Progress has been made, and it's looking good. The staircase was initially intended to be a fun feature, but it proved to be a safety hazard with its narrow and steep design. The solution is to build a couple of landings and add some railings to make it more user-friendly.

The garage itself has seen significant progress as well. A new garage door was installed using a dynalift, which allowed the team to lift the 10-ton door into place. The temporary wall that was erected inside the garage will come down once the roof is completed, and then work can begin on removing the bracing and making space for windows and a door. With the walls up, it's clear that this is going to be a big improvement over my current two-car garage.

The DeLorean: A Love Affair

Despite its many flaws, I've developed a strong affection for this car. The stainless steel body panels and gold-wing doors are undeniably stylish, but it's the negatives that really bring out the best in me. There's something to be said for owning a rear-engine sports car that's not very sporty or comfortable. Perhaps it's the challenge of making the most of a less-than-perfect design.

The DeLorean is more than just a car; it's an experience. And I'm willing to bet that my love affair with this thing will only continue to grow as time goes on. While there are still things to fix, like the air conditioning, which doesn't work because of a leaking condenser, and some minor cosmetic issues, such as the crack in the rear hatch, it's all part of owning an unusual vehicle.

I don't need a time machine to know that I'm going to be wasting more money on this thing in the future. In fact, I can already imagine myself driving into my garage, feeling a sense of satisfaction and accomplishment. And as long as I continue to have fun with it, what's a few thousand dollars here and there?

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enwell now I know what Doc Brown felt like when he spent his entire life savings fixing up his DeLorean to go back to the future but unlike Doc Brown's Back to the Future DeLorean when I got this thing up to 88 miles an hour nothing happened which is great this thing is running fantastically and for the first time I'm going to total up all the costs of fixing up the cheapest DeLorean in the USA there's a lot of money a lot and for all those that follow who B's garage regularly if not please subscribe you'll know that I usually I don't win this doesn't happen very often and it's weird because I did not intend on buying a DeLorean when I was up at a classic car auction back in December I had no intention of buying it and when I saw this car and thought it was an automatic I really didn't want to buy it but then it came across the auction block and I had missed out on one car and saw this one the second look it looked really nice and cosmetically this car is very nice and because I have zero impulse control at all I bought the car now on the third look things didn't look very good because the transmission was slipping very badly and I had some serious fuel issues but at only $14,000 that was the hammer price for this car I couldn't complain much it's really really cheap it was cheaper than any other running and driving DeLorean listed in the United States at the time now the old transmission it came back to life miraculously with some new fluid and a filter but it was still very much dead there were bits inside the pan and it was still slipping and really slow to get into gear so it needed to be replaced additionally the fuel system issues were really bad but I could still drive this car for the first time and oh man was it was it bad it would stall under any kind of load because of the fuel issues it was missing its mirrors the doors wouldn't stay up the tires from sitting for so long and they felt like squares and the brakes that was really scary I hit the brakes and almost nothing happened and the exhaust of course looks so rusty like it had been recovered from the Titanic and then slapped on my DeLorean which is weird because the rest of the car it's a good shape so with all that it looked like I was in for an old George McFly left hook knock punch and when I started shopping for a transmission things looked even worse the only one I could find was $5,000 a new old stock replacement I couldn't find a rebuild kit so I asked for your help on the internet and some stranger on the internet actually found the rebuild kit it was shared with an RV in Europe kind of weird and a few other cars but another stranger from the internet offered his used DeLorean transmission to me for only $1,000 he was swapping his for a manual transmission and didn't want to keep it's automatic which I obviously jumped on that was a great deal for a whole transmission and even more good news came from my mechanic the car wizard who discovered the fuel pump was the source of all of my fuel issues in my stalling it was actually not the right fuel pump for the car it was rigged in there incorrectly with a bad pickup hose anyway all I needed was a new fuel pump kit to make everything right a complete fuel pump kit for this car was five hundred and thirty dollars and it cost me two hundred and eighty dollars for the car was er to go in and install it all the used transmission cost one thousand dollars and I spent another seven hundred dollars in labor to install he also did the rear main seal since the transmission was out and it was leaking oil with another three hundred dollars spent on brake lines and some fresh fluid I had a driving DeLorean again which added up with the purchase price the auction fees transportation I was a little over $18,000 into the car which is still way under the money for one of these things so I was feeling pretty good but there was a long long way to go on this thing now about a month ago on my first real drive the first one where I didn't feel like I was going to die there were still a lot of problems the brakes even though I had new lines all around in a fresh bleed they still didn't feel right when I would brake hard it would pull really hard to the right the calipers they were still sticking so they needed to be replaced also when I went over bumps the steering column would rat there was a mount right on the firewall that had come apart and allowed the steering column to jiggle and rattle and make up pretty annoying noise but that was by far not the most annoying noise that went to the exhaust that sounded like a really badly running lawnmower when this thing was at wide open throttle and when I'm when I was done with my test drive sometimes I couldn't even get out of this car because the door latch would get all sticky and the struts were so weak so the door would actually Jam and there's no way to get out it's kind of claustrophobic because these window openings are so small even if I did shrink myself down to like an action figure sighs imagine a who B's garage action figure that's actually a good idea III couldn't have got out because this window regulator didn't work and the other side was having problems as well a lot of issues the headliner was also falling down and sagging in my hair visibility wasn't very good in this car even when it was new and had no problems but it was made much worse by the MIR glass completely missing on this car and the cherry on top had to be the ancient out-of-round tires of just miserable to drive it at any speed so I had to spend a lot of money not a lot so I had to go much much deeper into my wallet to sort this weird machine out with parts and labor I spent another five thousand six hundred and ninety dollars to fix this thing a lot of money a lot a lot of law and a big chunk of that was the exhaust it was $1,300 for this exhaust system with bigger headers along with a nice free-flowing exhaust system it actually sounds pretty good considering is coming for an engine with only whatever 120 horsepower so when you total up my purchase price with my first round of repairs then my second round of repairs my total invested is in this DeLorean is just under twenty four thousand dollars that's a lot considering where I started but when you look at cars for sale on autotrader.com which link below is my column on auto trader you see I got a pretty good deal the cheetahs went on there is thirty six thousand dollars if you look elsewhere on the internet some higher mileage ones that are pretty sorted like this are in the high 20s to low 30s so I'm sitting pretty good right now on this DeLorean this is a very very rare win for me speaking of justifying ways to spend way too much money let's stop by the new garage there's actually been a lot of progress there's walls I know I confused a lot of you in my last video with the staircase that was crumbling looked like it was falling apart or got attacked by Godzilla or something but there's actually intentional it's all been jackhammer down because while the staircase was fun to do can cans down it was actually really dangerous gets up about five and a half feet high with no railings and just a really narrow steep staircase we're gonna put in a few landings here so it'll be a couple steps and then a nice landing probably some rails built at the landscaping too where it's not a total deathtrap but moving on to the garage that's where the most progress is being made back here holy moly they brought in some serious equipment here because look at that I have a garage and I was actually here when the garage door went up they hoisted it up with the dynalift and as you can see I'll be able to drive a car into here that way I'm not having to stack out of the two-car garage this way this entire wall is going to come down that's why they've taken off the siding they've actually put a temporary wall inside the garage so they can rip this down but here it is tomorrow the roof or the roof for the roof goes on all the way then they could take down this bracing they'll cut out the access here for the door as well as a couple of windows now things are looking a lot bigger now the walls are up this is a good-sized garage still not enough to hold everything but like a pretty good dent let's get back to the DeLorean like I said earlier I'm $24,000 into this DeLorean now which coincidentally is about what they cost anew actually when the company went bankrupt towards the end they were selling him super cheap for like $14,000 whatever was left over and current pricing levels are just really silly movie hysteria aside these cars really don't have a lot going for them they're obviously very underpowered my exhaust video definitely proved that and for being a rear-engine Ascar it doesn't handle all that well either braking not very good and I have driven a manual one of these and it's really not that much better so what gives why all the DeLorean love I mean obviously the stainless steel naked metal panels and the gold wing doors are really really rad but the negatives there's a lot of negatives still I love this thing honestly I can't explain it but I'm really starting to fall in love with this car the more that I drive it even though it's not that comfortable of a cruiser either which was a great characteristic of so many sporty cars in the 80s that really aren't that sporty they were still comfortable but still there's just something about this car I'm really diggin it and I don't really understand myself at the moment why I love this thing still one thing's for sure though I don't need a time machine to know that I'm going to be wasting a lot more money on this thing in the future there's there's still some things to do the air conditioning doesn't work because the condenser is leaking and the interior needs to be cleaned up a little bit that back fiberglass rear hatch has a crack in it that needs fixed but it's all it's all small stuff and this thing this thing is gonna get all the love it deserves thank you for watching I know I'm nutswell now I know what Doc Brown felt like when he spent his entire life savings fixing up his DeLorean to go back to the future but unlike Doc Brown's Back to the Future DeLorean when I got this thing up to 88 miles an hour nothing happened which is great this thing is running fantastically and for the first time I'm going to total up all the costs of fixing up the cheapest DeLorean in the USA there's a lot of money a lot and for all those that follow who B's garage regularly if not please subscribe you'll know that I usually I don't win this doesn't happen very often and it's weird because I did not intend on buying a DeLorean when I was up at a classic car auction back in December I had no intention of buying it and when I saw this car and thought it was an automatic I really didn't want to buy it but then it came across the auction block and I had missed out on one car and saw this one the second look it looked really nice and cosmetically this car is very nice and because I have zero impulse control at all I bought the car now on the third look things didn't look very good because the transmission was slipping very badly and I had some serious fuel issues but at only $14,000 that was the hammer price for this car I couldn't complain much it's really really cheap it was cheaper than any other running and driving DeLorean listed in the United States at the time now the old transmission it came back to life miraculously with some new fluid and a filter but it was still very much dead there were bits inside the pan and it was still slipping and really slow to get into gear so it needed to be replaced additionally the fuel system issues were really bad but I could still drive this car for the first time and oh man was it was it bad it would stall under any kind of load because of the fuel issues it was missing its mirrors the doors wouldn't stay up the tires from sitting for so long and they felt like squares and the brakes that was really scary I hit the brakes and almost nothing happened and the exhaust of course looks so rusty like it had been recovered from the Titanic and then slapped on my DeLorean which is weird because the rest of the car it's a good shape so with all that it looked like I was in for an old George McFly left hook knock punch and when I started shopping for a transmission things looked even worse the only one I could find was $5,000 a new old stock replacement I couldn't find a rebuild kit so I asked for your help on the internet and some stranger on the internet actually found the rebuild kit it was shared with an RV in Europe kind of weird and a few other cars but another stranger from the internet offered his used DeLorean transmission to me for only $1,000 he was swapping his for a manual transmission and didn't want to keep it's automatic which I obviously jumped on that was a great deal for a whole transmission and even more good news came from my mechanic the car wizard who discovered the fuel pump was the source of all of my fuel issues in my stalling it was actually not the right fuel pump for the car it was rigged in there incorrectly with a bad pickup hose anyway all I needed was a new fuel pump kit to make everything right a complete fuel pump kit for this car was five hundred and thirty dollars and it cost me two hundred and eighty dollars for the car was er to go in and install it all the used transmission cost one thousand dollars and I spent another seven hundred dollars in labor to install he also did the rear main seal since the transmission was out and it was leaking oil with another three hundred dollars spent on brake lines and some fresh fluid I had a driving DeLorean again which added up with the purchase price the auction fees transportation I was a little over $18,000 into the car which is still way under the money for one of these things so I was feeling pretty good but there was a long long way to go on this thing now about a month ago on my first real drive the first one where I didn't feel like I was going to die there were still a lot of problems the brakes even though I had new lines all around in a fresh bleed they still didn't feel right when I would brake hard it would pull really hard to the right the calipers they were still sticking so they needed to be replaced also when I went over bumps the steering column would rat there was a mount right on the firewall that had come apart and allowed the steering column to jiggle and rattle and make up pretty annoying noise but that was by far not the most annoying noise that went to the exhaust that sounded like a really badly running lawnmower when this thing was at wide open throttle and when I'm when I was done with my test drive sometimes I couldn't even get out of this car because the door latch would get all sticky and the struts were so weak so the door would actually Jam and there's no way to get out it's kind of claustrophobic because these window openings are so small even if I did shrink myself down to like an action figure sighs imagine a who B's garage action figure that's actually a good idea III couldn't have got out because this window regulator didn't work and the other side was having problems as well a lot of issues the headliner was also falling down and sagging in my hair visibility wasn't very good in this car even when it was new and had no problems but it was made much worse by the MIR glass completely missing on this car and the cherry on top had to be the ancient out-of-round tires of just miserable to drive it at any speed so I had to spend a lot of money not a lot so I had to go much much deeper into my wallet to sort this weird machine out with parts and labor I spent another five thousand six hundred and ninety dollars to fix this thing a lot of money a lot a lot of law and a big chunk of that was the exhaust it was $1,300 for this exhaust system with bigger headers along with a nice free-flowing exhaust system it actually sounds pretty good considering is coming for an engine with only whatever 120 horsepower so when you total up my purchase price with my first round of repairs then my second round of repairs my total invested is in this DeLorean is just under twenty four thousand dollars that's a lot considering where I started but when you look at cars for sale on autotrader.com which link below is my column on auto trader you see I got a pretty good deal the cheetahs went on there is thirty six thousand dollars if you look elsewhere on the internet some higher mileage ones that are pretty sorted like this are in the high 20s to low 30s so I'm sitting pretty good right now on this DeLorean this is a very very rare win for me speaking of justifying ways to spend way too much money let's stop by the new garage there's actually been a lot of progress there's walls I know I confused a lot of you in my last video with the staircase that was crumbling looked like it was falling apart or got attacked by Godzilla or something but there's actually intentional it's all been jackhammer down because while the staircase was fun to do can cans down it was actually really dangerous gets up about five and a half feet high with no railings and just a really narrow steep staircase we're gonna put in a few landings here so it'll be a couple steps and then a nice landing probably some rails built at the landscaping too where it's not a total deathtrap but moving on to the garage that's where the most progress is being made back here holy moly they brought in some serious equipment here because look at that I have a garage and I was actually here when the garage door went up they hoisted it up with the dynalift and as you can see I'll be able to drive a car into here that way I'm not having to stack out of the two-car garage this way this entire wall is going to come down that's why they've taken off the siding they've actually put a temporary wall inside the garage so they can rip this down but here it is tomorrow the roof or the roof for the roof goes on all the way then they could take down this bracing they'll cut out the access here for the door as well as a couple of windows now things are looking a lot bigger now the walls are up this is a good-sized garage still not enough to hold everything but like a pretty good dent let's get back to the DeLorean like I said earlier I'm $24,000 into this DeLorean now which coincidentally is about what they cost anew actually when the company went bankrupt towards the end they were selling him super cheap for like $14,000 whatever was left over and current pricing levels are just really silly movie hysteria aside these cars really don't have a lot going for them they're obviously very underpowered my exhaust video definitely proved that and for being a rear-engine Ascar it doesn't handle all that well either braking not very good and I have driven a manual one of these and it's really not that much better so what gives why all the DeLorean love I mean obviously the stainless steel naked metal panels and the gold wing doors are really really rad but the negatives there's a lot of negatives still I love this thing honestly I can't explain it but I'm really starting to fall in love with this car the more that I drive it even though it's not that comfortable of a cruiser either which was a great characteristic of so many sporty cars in the 80s that really aren't that sporty they were still comfortable but still there's just something about this car I'm really diggin it and I don't really understand myself at the moment why I love this thing still one thing's for sure though I don't need a time machine to know that I'm going to be wasting a lot more money on this thing in the future there's there's still some things to do the air conditioning doesn't work because the condenser is leaking and the interior needs to be cleaned up a little bit that back fiberglass rear hatch has a crack in it that needs fixed but it's all it's all small stuff and this thing this thing is gonna get all the love it deserves thank you for watching I know I'm nuts\n"