With its gullwing doors and stainless steel skin, the DeLorean DMC-12 certainly looked the part of a hot sports car during its star turn in Back to the Future. But in reality, the guts couldn't match the flashy exterior. It was wimpy. So wimpy, in fact, that a blogger at Jalopnik is questioning the event that sets the whole BTTF story in motion: Marty going 88 mph in the mall parking lot to go back in time in the first place.

In a math-heavy post about the problem, Bullitt Ride traces the DeLorean's paths over a map of the parking lot where the scene was shot back in the 1980s, and then calculated how fast the car could have been traveling based on what we know about its acceleration specs. The conclusion: No way.

Bullitt Ride explains how he set up the problem:

According to Wikipedia a DeLorean will do 0-60mph in 8.8 seconds. To keep things simple I assumed a constant acceleration, up to 60mph this is a reasonable assumption, above 60 mph drag typically starts to take hold and acceleration starts to decrease, so if anything it's an optimistic assumption. I'm also ignoring the fact the the parking lot in the movie was wet, and that the car would have likely been even slower with the added weight from the equipment Doc added to it. And yes, I'm also assuming that Doc hadn't done anything to improve the acceleration performance of the DeLorean.

Basically, Bullitt Ride explains, because we know the DeLorean's 0 to 60 time, we can calculate roughly its acceleration. And if you know the distance that the car needs to travel to hit 88 mph, then you can use the acceleration number to determine whether Marty (or Einstein) would make it in time—or end up smashing into "whatever that little booth was that the Libyans smashed into." By these calculations, it wasn't even close. The DeLorean would've reached only about 70 mph in that span.

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As The Verge points out, this conclusion rides on a few assumptions that a DeLorean defender could question. For one thing, a car's acceleration is not steady, so the acceleration number here is just an estimate. More importantly: Would Doc Brown have gone to all the trouble to build a time machine—one that could be powered by trash in the world of 2015—without pumping up the power of the DMC-12's internal combustion engine? If the entire project rides on getting it up to 88 mph (and you point the thing at yourself during the first experiment), then you'd think acceleration would be one of your primary concerns.

Unless Bullitt Ride is wrong, though, I guess we're stuck with the past we've got.

Source: Jalopnik

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