I’m no car nut, and I already have the frustratingly happy misfortune of owning the it-always-breaks-down-but-is-totally-beautiful car that I’d always wanted as a kid, but DeLorean, the (now) American car company that still makes the iconic gull-wing DMC-12 made especially famous by Back To the Future’s Marty McFly (and a time travel-enabling “Flux Capacitor”), is making me squirm a little covetously this afternoon, not to mention a-harkening back to Doc Emmett’s legendary enthusiasms (“If my calculations are correct, when this baby hits eighty-eight miles per hour…you’re gonna see some serious shit!”). Why? Because in 2013, the company is indeed going back to the future with an all-electric version that looks exactly like the original, save for some updates to the interior and a conspicuously powerful, equivalent 260hp engine that doesn’t make a sound.

It’s a bummer that we’ll have to wait another two years before their production line starts churning them out (at a rumoured $100,000 a pop). I imagine the wait-list will be long, but I want one, and nevermind the limitations of its 70-100 mile range. Car blogger Jalopnik just gave the prototype a test drive and was properly besotted…

I was told, to really appreciate it, I had to drive it. So I did. “Turn the key until you hear the click, then turn the center dial over to ‘D'” DMC president Stephen Wynne tells me. Honestly, I’m still buzzing from the sensation of closing the stainless steel gullwing door just moments earlier. I twist the key and rotate the surprisingly weighty metal dial. Silence. I press the gas pedal, which, true to form with any 1980s exotic, has so much resistance it’s more like a piece of gym equipment. Press harder, and we silently glide forward.When someone gives you permission to go all Daytona USA in an electron-powered DeLorean, you just turn your brain off and do what the man says […] I grip the thick, DMC-customized Momo steering wheel tighter and open up the throttle throttle as we exit the banking. It surges forward. It feels like a car carrying bit of weight, but now with more than enough torque to overcome its heft. We whisk down the too-short straight and arrive almost instantly at the next corner without making sound. This is making sense. If the DMCEV can do 0-to-60 mph in 4.9 seconds as DMC claims, it will finally pack the performance that the Giugiaro body has been promising all these years […] “I’m afraid someone’s going to steal it,” Wynne says with a laugh. “They’ll just drive it right out of the shop and won’t hear it leave!”

Bonus irony: the battery is from a California company called Flux Power.

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