Styled by Giorgetto Giugiaro and engineered around a Lotus-derived backbone chassis, the DMC-12 paired unpainted brushed-stainless body panels with gull-wing doors and a rear-mounted PRV V6 shared with the Renault 30, Volvo 264 and Peugeot 604.[1] Road testers at the time were unimpressed with the performance for a $25,000 sports car (Road & Track measured 10.5 seconds to 60 mph against DMC’s own claimed 8.8), and quality control at the young Dunmurry, Northern Ireland factory was inconsistent enough that DMC set up dedicated Quality Assurance Centers in the US to fix cars before they reached dealers. None of that mattered commercially once the car appeared, three years after the company folded, as the time machine in Back to the Future.
Only one drivetrain is recorded: the 2.8-litre PRV V6 with its standard
5-speed manual (a 3-speed automatic was the sole factory option). The
article’s own torque figure is inconsistent with itself (the body text and
infobox both cite 153 lb-ft, while a separate technical-data table, drawing
on period Road & Track and Car and Driver tests, states 162 lb-ft for the
same engine at the same rpm), so this entry records the more widely repeated
153 lb-ft figure as conflicting-sources rather than picking one silently
or averaging the two. The
0-60 mph time is recorded nowhere here as a 0-100 km/h figure, because the
source never publishes one and the two are not the same measurement.
