Last week when I posted these photos of the DeLorean I saw on the highway. The actual owner of the car contacted me after seeing my photos I uploaded to Flickr with this wonderful news:

Hi,

Nice pic of the DeLorean on your flickr page. That’s my car and I was the one driving past you. If you want to see more DeLoreans, Friday, come out to Westmont for an outdoor drive-in style showing of “Back to the Future”, FREE! It was supposed to be last Friday, but it was postponed due to weather. We were scheduled to have about 6 cars there. I don’t know how many can make it this week.

Westmont Park District

http://www.wpd4fun.org/

DeLorean Midwest Connection (car club I’m in)
http://www.deloreanmidwest.com

– Marty

Yes, his real name is Marty and that’s his car I’m sitting in! The members of the club were really nice and had six DeLoreans on display, which was a really neat sight.

As it turns out, DeLoreans aren’t as hard to purchase if you really want one and it’s even easier to obtain parts for them. There is a DeLorean Motor Company branch in Crystal Lake, Ill., that has spare parts and does restorations. There are also branches in Texas, Florida, California, Washington and even the Netherlands.

You can buy a pre-owned DeLorean from around $25-35,000 or you can even get a custom built new DeLorean starting at $57,500. You can also find DeLoreans on eBay Motors for slightly lower in price.

I asked a few practical questions, such as, “Do you have to have the oil changed every 3,000 miles?” and apparently the car can go 7,000 miles without an oil change — although one owner said he changed his oil every year regardless of miles and Marty said he hasn’t changed his in two years.

I was also surprised to find out that the doors only need 14 inches of clearance to open, which really isn’t that much. Another detail I’d never noticed before was the little red and yellow lights on the bottom of the door. Also, the coolest thing about the dashboard was the “door ajar” light. It’s a profile of the DeLorean’s signature frame with one of the doors opening upward. A tiny, but nifty detail.

The movie in the park was a lot of fun, too. I’d actually never been to a drive-in styled movie before, so it was great to see the film on a large screen.

If you ever want to see a DeLorean in the Chicagoland area, just check out the DeLorean Midwest Connection’s events page — they’ve got a lot of events up and are pretty cool people to meet.

Post script: For those who are wondering how in the world Marty found my photos that I took, it turns out he saw me snapping photos with my camera while we were driving and thought to look up “delorean” tagged photos on Flickr later. Hooray for the Internet!