If you possess a healthy dose of recklessness and the gambling instincts of a degenerate, it might just buy you an icon, a DeLorean DMC-12. This is exactly what happened during an episode of Storage Hunters UK, a program where the format is as cruel as it is simple: you peek into a container, you don’t touch a thing, and you bid your life savings on a pile of mystery junk. It’s essentially the financial equivalent of Russian Roulette.
On that particular day, a sealed container, untouched for at least twenty years, held a massive, shapeless mass draped under a heavy tarp. While most sensible people would see a dusty mystery to avoid, one woman decided to ignore the red flags and dropped $3,200 on the lot. When the tarp was finally whipped away, it didn’t reveal a rusted-out lawnmower or a collection of moth-eaten sofas. Instead, it revealed the unmistakable, wedge-shaped silhouette of a DeLorean DMC-12.
The DeLorean is the stuff of legend. It was John DeLorean’s “malleable” dream: gull-wing doors, a stainless steel body, and a reputation as a cursed financial disaster that eventually took down the entire company.
Then Robert Zemeckis stepped in, handed the keys to Doc Brown, and turned a commercial failure into a permanent fixture of pop culture immortality. Back to the Future did more for the brand than any marketing department could have dreamt of, ensuring that as long as people love the eighties, they will love this car.
But here is where the story shifts from “unlikely” to “downright impossible”. Usually, a car left to rot in a box for two decades behaves like a terminal patient; the seals are gone, the fluids have turned to sludge, and the engine is little more than a paperweight. Yet, this DMC-12 actually turned over. The motor ran. For $3,200, she walked away with a functional piece of cinematic history valued at a minimum of $32,000. That’s a ten-fold return on investment for a car that originally couldn’t even save its own manufacturer from bankruptcy.
Today, you can buy a DeLorean LEGO set, a snow globe, or even a full-scale replica for a staggering $100,000. It’s a bizarre irony of the industry: the car that failed to sell enough units to survive forty years ago is now selling everything else forty years later. Sometimes, it pays to bet on the mystery under the blanket.
