A typical sign of summer is the convertibles, vintage muscle cars, motorcycles, sports cars and other exotic vehicles that emerge from their garages on fair-weather days and take to the winding roads of western Massachusetts. But those traveling on Route 2 in Franklin County this summer may have witnessed any even rarer sight that likely prompted a double take: five DeLoreans, plus one Firebird, cruising westbound.
The DeLorean was produced by the DeLorean Motor Company and its founder, John DeLorean, for a short time between early 1981 and late 1982. Despite only producing about 9,000 DeLoreans, the car, exhibiting a futuristic appearance with its gull-wing doors and stainless steel body, was immortalized when Director Robert Zemeckis used a modified model of the vehicle as the time machine in the “Back to the Future” trilogy.
Due to its high status in pop culture, the DeLorean has developed a cult following, and those who own them, united by a common interest, have built a community through owners groups. On May 31, the owners group made up of members from Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Maine convened at Jumptown Skydiving in Orange, cruising west along Route 2 to North Adams before turning north to Vermont. Though the ride was intended to be all DeLoreans, one owner arrived in a Firebird due to mechanical issues.
The North East Region DeLoreans, as the local owners group is called, was founded in 2020 by Adam Harriott of Rowley and fellow DeLorean owner Mike Nackel when a chance interaction led to the two getting in touch.
“I was driving up to New Hampshire one day to get a replacement windshield. Mike’s girlfriend’s son saw me on Route 93 and took a picture of the car and sent it to Mike. Mike was able to find me on Facebook and said, ‘We should start a club,’ and that was that,” Harriott recounted. “We got four or five members right away, and now it’s closer to 40, and that’s just Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Maine. Our base is more on the coast of Massachusetts and New Hampshire; that area is where most owners are from.”
Harriott’s interest in DeLoreans began when he was 6, but he is one of the few DeLorean owners who did not become interested through “Back to the Future.”
“I had a toy called Thunderhawk, which was part of a toy line called M.A.S.K. … Thunderhawk was a Camaro, but it had gull-wing doors, and it would fly,” Harriott said. “As a young child, I had no idea it wasn’t a DeLorean; I just knew it was a cool car. As I got older, I realized they fashioned it after the DeLorean, so that became my goal: to get one.”
In 2016, Harriott sold a comic book collection and began to save money for a DeLorean. In 2019, Harriott bought his car from a seller in White Plains, New York, for $28,500. Luckily, the purchase came at the perfect time, as soon after, DeLoreans exploded in value.
“I kind of knew right when I bought it that the prices were going to explode. The 35-year anniversary of [“Back to the Future”] was coming,” Harriott said. “Everyone my age was turning 40 and had more disposable income, and those two factors combined with COVID made the prices explode. So my car, which I bought for $28,500, is worth $50,000 now.”
Harriott commutes in his DeLorean frequently, having put roughly 50,000 miles on it since he bought it. Harriott hasn’t done any over-the-top modifications, and has dealt with little to no mechanical problems, though he has experienced recent engine trouble.
“For the most part, the money I’ve put into it is stuff I wanted to do, not stuff I had to do,” Harriott noted.
While Harriott’s installation of a third brake light, from a Corvette, and LEDs throughout the car are popular modifications for DeLoreans, some owners choose to modify their cars to emulate the “Back to the Future” time machine. Mike Lerra, of Acton, is one of these owners. His screen-accurate time machine was in attendance in Orange for the May cruise.
Lerra grew up as a fan of “Back to the Future,” and he happened to see a DeLorean in person when he was 13, which was when he decided he would like to have one of his own someday. However, Lerra would ultimately get on the path of acquiring his DeLorean not through “Back to the Future,” but rather “Harry Potter.”
“The idea to do the time machine actually started much, much smaller, when I was looking for a project to do with my kids one weekend, and we decided we were going to make ‘Harry Potter’ wands,” Lerra recounted. “I found a fun video on YouTube that showed us how to make the wands, and I found another video that showed how to connect a battery and a switch and an LED, so you can press a button and make the wand light up.
“That was when the proverbial lightbulb went off for me, because that’s sort of the movie magic,” he continued. “So I became interested in small electronics, and I started to build some of the electronic pieces from ‘Back to the Future.’”
As Lerra continued to build electronic parts for a time machine, he decided he would go all the way and purchase a DeLorean. In 2023, after seven months of tracking prices and browsing listings in an increasingly expensive market, Lerra found an ideal Craigslist listing in Washington State.
“It was listed on a Saturday, was immediately marked as sold, but was relisted on Monday. I called up the seller, and he explained that the previous deal had fallen through, and I told him, ‘I’ll be at your house tomorrow with a check,’ because I felt like it was a really good price compared to what I’d seen,” Lerra recalled. “An hour later I went to my bank, got a money order and the next day I was on a plane. I bought the car, and made some shipping arrangements, and a week or two later it was at my house.”
Lerra has been able to make the majority of the modifications to his DeLorean by himself, besides the rear exhaust vents, which he had welded in Nashua, New Hampshire. Through Facebook groups, rigorous rewatching of the “Back to the Future” trilogy, and photos of the time machine, which is on display at the Petersen Automotive Museum in Los Angeles, Lerra has been able to make the car accurate to the film, down to the types of screws that are used and in what places.
For Lerra and Harriott, owning a DeLorean is a dream come true, but one of the best parts is the community that North East Region DeLoreans, abbreviated NERD, provides.
“For me, it is important to have something like [North East Region DeLoreans] as an outlet,” Harriott said. “I don’t smoke, I don’t drink, I don’t party. So it’s great to have some other sort of community I can attach myself to.”
“The social part is something I did not expect, but it is my favorite part,” Lerra agreed. “The local owners group gets together about once a month, sometimes to go on a drive, sometimes to work on each other’s cars. So there’s the social piece of it — everyone is clearly a fan of ’80s pop culture and making references, but also being able to help someone out just makes you feel great, and it makes their DeLorean all that more reliable. That has all been a pleasant surprise, but it is easily my favorite part of it.”
For more information about future events, visit the North East Region DeLorean Facebook page at facebook.com/p/North-East-Region-DeLoreans-100095695744968.
