Go ‘Back to the Future’ With This Hand-Built DeLorean Hovercraft
Where you’re going, you won’t need roads.
As far as anyone knows, there is just one DeLorean Hovercraft in the world. That it exists at all is pretty damn cool, but it’s also currently up for auction on Bring a Trailer, an online vintage vehicle dealer.
Currently, the highest bid is $22,250—exactly half of what the modded movie car sold for last year. The lucky buyer gets an amazing grown-up toy that looks like it came straight out of the 1985 hit sci-fi comedy Back to the Future in addition to a matching trailer and a California boat title in the seller’s name.
As creator and owner Matt Riese previously noted, this isn’t just “a Delorean bolted onto a hovercraft.” He created it from scratch, tested it, drove it around San Francisco Bay for years, and he’s become a kind of local celeb as a result.
Video of Riese putting the DeLorean through its paces should be all that’s needed to at least covet this thing. It isn’t just fun, either—it appears to be well-built and durable.
Here’s Riese’s description of what the buyer will get:
The Hovercraft is based on the blueprints for the Universal Hovercraft UH-13PT. The basic shape of the hull, skirt, and fan ducts come from those blueprints, but pretty much everything else is customized. The Delorean body is made out of styrofoam wrapped in fiberglass and painted with metallic paint. The 36” thrust fan is powered by a 23hp Briggs & Stratton Vanguard riding lawnmower-style engine.
The 24” lift fan is powered by a B&S 875 Professional series push mower engine. The hull of the craft hovers about 6-8 inches over the surface, and can hover over anything relatively flat: land, water, ice, snow, sand, asphalt, etc. The top speed with the current thrust configuration is 31 mph on the water in good conditions.
The top speed doesn’t look that impressive on the screen, but it’s obvious from Riese’s footage that it feels like you’re zipping along at almost 88 mph.
A number of upgrades have been made for 2019. The engine received new head gaskets and a performance camshaft, its delaminated decking has been patched, and the undercarriage is fitted with a new translucent hover skirt. The battery, fuel line, rudders and engine cover have also all been replaced.
In a fun nod to the classic movie, the cockpit’s center stack, which contains the primary switchgear and major controls, also includes faux controls for the Mr. Fusion fuel converter, Anti-Gravity mode, and the Flux Capacitor device.
Riese calls his hovercraft “a functional work of art,” but real DeLoreans aren’t just museum pieces. A new model was promised to arrive in 2019, for a little over twice the price of the hovercraft.
While the DeLorean Motor Company is still taking orders for the revived model, the DeLorean DMC-12-Style Hovercraft’s auction ends on November 4. Place your bids quickly here.
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