Although a sedan was supposedly in the works, the late DeLorean Motor Company had, at one time, much larger plans. A batch of documents currently for sale on eBay detail the company's interest in building nothing less than a forty-foot long transit bus in the United States.

(Click through the jump to read more on the DMC-80 and the Transbus program)

Hoping to encourage the development of accessible low-floor transit buses, the Urban Mass Transit Administration launched the Transbus program in 1973. The goal was to find the ideal bus design with a floor height no more than 22" and devices (either lifts or ramps) to provide access to passengers with wheelchairs.

Three manufacturers (General Motors, Rohr-Flxible and AM General) participated in the program, but progress was halted around 1975, when GM and Rohr complained of the advanced technologies required to make such a bus reality. By 1978, both had introduced buses that incorporated some of the Transbus' specifications, but in reality, were little different than buses of two decades prior; by 1981, the program was officially dead.

Just a year before the cancellation, DMC announced it would bring a low-floor bus to the United States - building, as one newspaper headline put it, "the buses that General Motors [wouldn't]." The company hired the chief engineer of GM's Transbus and began talking with FFG, a German coach builder, of licensing their design. The bus, christened the DMC-80, would be little more than a badge-engineered product, but it would sport that crucial 22" floor height. According to these documents, the bus would be built under license in the United States, as the included blueprints show possible assembly plant locations in New York.

A lack of funding, along with the simultaneous cancellation of the Transbus program, led to DMC abandoning the bus, but that's not to say the DMC-80 couldn't have been successful. FFG buses of the same design successfully ran throughout Europe (ironically, even in Ireland) nearly a decade before low-floor designs became prevalent in North America.

+ eBay: DeLorean DMC-80 Transbus Blueprints
+ Rare Preliminary DeLorean Sedan Sketches/Musings On eBay
+ Leaked Memo: John DeLorean Berates His PR Guy