The History of the three gold-plated American Express DMC-12 started in Christmas 1979, when a DeLorean/American Express promotion planned to sell one hundred 24k gold-plated DeLoreans for $85,000 each to its gold card members, but only two were sold. One of these was purchased by Roger Mize, president of Snyder National Bank in Snyder, Texas. VIN #4301 sat in the bank lobby for over 20 years before being loaned to the Petersen Automotive Museum of Los Angeles. It has a black interior, and an automatic transmission. The second gold-plated American Express DMC-12 is at the William F. Harrah Foundation/National Automobile Museum in Reno, Nevada. This car, VIN #4300, is the only one of the three existing gold-plated examples to be equipped with a manual transmission. This car has a tan interior that was planned for introduction later in the 1982 model year. Like its golden siblings, it is a low-mileage vehicle with only 1,442 miles (2,307 km) on the odometer. A third gold-plated car exists with 636 miles (1,018 km) clocked up; it carries the latest VIN for the last DeLorean, #20105, though it is an earlier production car that was unfinished for reasons unknown, and the final assembly and installation of the gold panels was actually completed in Columbus, Ohio in 1983 by Consolidated International. This car was assembled with spare parts that were required by American Express in case one of the other two that were built was damaged. This car and the example in Reno have saddle-brown leather interiors, a colour scheme which was intended to become an option on later production cars. A fourth gold car was privately plated by its owner in 1981 and was later sold to a private individual in Canada. Its current whereabouts are unknown.
Posted on: Sun, 17 Aug 2014 03:49:32 +0000
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