This Is What It Looks Like When You Lift A DeLorean Body Off Of Its Chassis

This Is What It Looks Like When You Lift A DeLorean Body Off Of Its ChassisEveryone remembers the DeLorean DMC-12 for its doors, for its unpainted body, for the movie. But it in and of itself was an interesting car design, which you can see pretty well when you lift the whole body off of its chassis.

This is possible because the DeLorean uses what you'd call a backbone chassis. It traces its roots back to Hans Ledwinka (the pioneering Czech designer who gave the world the Tatra and also kind of the Volkswagen) in the 1920s and made popular by Colin Chapman of Lotus. Alright, so it wasn't exactly super popular. But Lotus made great use of its basic idea to have a single, light, rigid structure running down the middle of the car like a spine, then you build everything off of that.