Uncovered: John DeLorean’s Plans for Public Transit; DeLorean Monorail
Automotive genius / failure John DeLorean's (1925 - 2005) lasting legacy will most likely be his DMC-12 sports car (or, in some circles, his cocaine trial, his Hollywood girfriends/wives, his glory days at General Motors, or his Logan Manufacturing snow equipment). But thanks to the U.S. Patent and Trademark office, we can see that JZD had plans to extend his "ethical" engineering credo into the world of public transportation. This 1994 patent file records DeLorean's manifest for a cantilevered mass transit system that would extend "along a median strip between lanes of a divided highway." It is, in effect, the DeLorean Monorail (DMC-100?). Click through for more illustrations, details, and the link.
The transit system has a unique suspension architecture with a "shock absorbing means for connecting said car means to said frame so that said car means is substantially isolated from irregularities in said track during motion of said frame and said car means along said track." The overuse of "said" is original, and much in keeping with typical intellectual property legal mumbo jumbo.
+ U.S. Patent and Trademark office: Transportation system, vehicle and method
(Note, USPTO site does not work well with Firefox; use IE instead)
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Need 4 Cars » John DeLorean and the monorail that never was
[...] Apparently John DeLorean was into more than just threatening the Big 3 with his DMC-12 stainless steel-bodied sports car. Winding Road uncovered a patent filed with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) for a unique monorail design that shows a pair of tracks suspended on either side of a divided highway. The elevated monorail would also allow an additional lane of traffic to flow beneath it. The DeLorean monorail, of course, was never built, and John DeLorean left this mortal plane in 2005. So unless someone else cares to pick up and carry the late, great almost-automaker’s torch, it will remain filed away in the USPTO’s archives where Winding Road found it. [...]
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