We all dream about finding a perfectly preserved car in a barn somewhere, but despite what you see on TV and YouTube, they are exceedingly rare. A DeLorean restorer from Crystal Lake, Ill., near Chicago, was no stranger to beat-up old cars, but his most recent project is noteworthy, even compared to some of the impressive metal seen pulled from storage over the years.
Michael McElhattan of DeLorean Midwest got a call from a DeLorean owner about a low-mileage car in all-original condition, hidden in a shed in Wisconsin. Not one to miss out on a deal, he moved fast. “It happened pretty quick, because once I found out the car was close and it was a low-mileage car, I was excited to go take a look.”
McElhattan and his social media coordinator made the trip, and upon opening the barn, they found the car in a sad state. “We open it up, and the first thing I saw was a mouse running across the center console,” he said. The DeLorean had been sitting for two decades but showed just 977 miles on the clock, making it well worth the effort and cost to restore.
Though rodents had infiltrated the cabin, the car lacked the sun damage commonly seen on others. “The condition of the leather, the condition of the instruments in the dash, and a lot of places where you see sun damage, and that’s one of the big killers on this – this car virtually has no sun damage,” McElhattan noted.
Why wasn’t it driven over the years? McElhattan says the previous owner “said he would just go out in the barn and just look at it ’cause he thought it was a really cool car.”
Surprisingly, the DeLorean is far from the hot performance car its looks suggest. DeLorean only managed a little over a year of production before the company fell apart, and the cars were not as popular then as they are now. The nostalgia for DeLorean is strong, especially for kids of the 1970s and 1980s, when the car had a starring role in the “Back to the Future” franchise. Nostalgia has a strong pull, though, and Hagerty estimates a Concours-condition DeLorean to be worth $102,000, with values climbing over the last year.
