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A front view of the De Lorean as seen on the Universal Studios backlot tour.

In the Back to the Future trilogy, the De Lorean time machine is the fictional time travelling vehicle used by "Doc" Emmett Brown (Christopher Lloyd) and Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox) to travel through the history of their hometown of Hill Valley, a fictional city located in Northern California. In the trilogy, the time machine is built by Doc from a regular De Lorean DMC-12 automobile.

The De Lorean's time circuits as they appeared one minute after the first demonstration.

The operation of the De Lorean time machine is consistent throughout all three movies. The operator sits inside the De Lorean and turns on the time circuits, activating a VFD readout that shows the target, present, and last-departed dates and times. After entering a target date, the operator accelerates the car to 88 miles per hour which activates the flux capacitor. The car vanishes in a flash of blue light, leaving twin trails of fire; observers outside the vehicle see it explode and disappear, while occupants see a quick flash of light and instantaneously arrive at the target date in the same geographical location it was when it departed. Upon arriving at the destination, the De Lorean is extremely cold, with ice covering much of the exterior. This is only seen in Part 1 for reasons not made clear in the film. In real world terms, it was a matter of production cost/logistics of applying dry ice to the vehicle to achieve the effect, which was felt to be insufficiently important to continue in the sequels.

The "flux capacitor", which consists of a box with three small, flashing neon tubes arranged as a "Y", is described by Doc Brown as "what makes time travel possible". The device is located between the headrests of the seats and, as the time machine nears eighty-eight miles per hour, the light of the flux capacitor pulses faster until it has a steady stream of light. Doc originally conceived the idea for the flux capacitor on November 5, 1955 when he slipped and bumped his head while standing on his toilet to hang a clock.

It is not made clear in the films exactly how the flux capacitor works beyond that of a typical plot device, though Doc mentions at one point that the stainless steel body of the De Lorean has a beneficial effect on the "flux dispersal", though he is interrupted before he can say any more. The flux capacitor requires 1.21 gigawatts of electricity to operate.

For most of the first film, the 1.21 gigawatts was supplied by a plutonium-powered nuclear reactor and, with the absence of plutonium, a bolt of lightning channeled directly into the flux capacitor in the film's climactic sequence. At the end of the first film and for the remainder of the trilogy, the plutonium is replaced by a "Mr. Fusion Home Energy Reactor" generator acquired in the year 2015. An obvious parody of Mr. Coffee, the prop is built from a Krups coffee grinder. The "Mr. Fusion" device apparently converts household waste into electrical power. Due to a "hover conversion" made in 2015, the car also became capable of flight, though it lost this ability at the end of Part II.

The De Lorean time machine is a licensed, registered vehicle in the state of California, where the films take place. The vanity license plate used in the film says "OUTATIME" (which is too long for the standard 7 characters on California license plates), and when Doc comes back from the future, it's a futuristic barcode license plate.

Although the De Lorean is destroyed at the end of the trilogy, a new flux capacitor enables Doc's second time machine (fashioned from a 19th century steam locomotive) to travel through time. Unlike its predecessor, the locomotive's flux capacitor is steam-powered and located on the front of the vehicle rather than within the passenger area. The locomotive also has the ability to fly, much like the De Lorean at the end of Part I and throughout Part II, and the future (2015) era cars in Part II.

However, in the animated series, Doc rebuilds the De Lorean, restoring most of its features, including Mr. Fusion and the hover conversion.

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The time machine went through several variations during production of the first film, Back to the Future. In the first draft of the screenplay, the time machine was a laser device that was housed in a room (like the time machine featured in Deja Vu). At the end of the first draft the device was attached to a refrigerator and taken to an atomic bomb test site. Director Robert Zemeckis said in an interview that the idea was scrapped because he did not want children to start climbing into refrigerators and getting trapped inside. In the third draft of the film the time machine was a car, as Zemeckis reasoned that if you were going to make a time machine, you would want it to be mobile.^[1] The specific choice of vehicle was a De Lorean DMC-12 for the purposes of it looking like a UFO.^[2] However, in order to send Marty back to the future, the vehicle had to drive into a nuclear test site. Ultimately this concept was considered too expensive to film, so the power source was changed to lightning.

Different parts from three 1981 De Loreans were used in the film, and they were modified to accommodate a more powerful and reliable Porsche engine. Liquid nitrogen was poured onto the car for scenes after it had travelled through time to give the impression that it was cold. The base for the nuclear-reactor was made from the hubcap from a Dodge Polara. Aircraft parts and blinking lights were added for effect. The production ultimately used three real De Loreans: one for external drive/race scenes, one with a modified interior for entering/exiting the De Lorean, and one stripped down model for interior scenes only.

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See also: References to Back to the Future in popular culture

• In an episode of Johnny Bravo, Johnny was tricked into believing he had been sent back into the 1980s and requested someone to 'drive 88 miles per hour so I can get back to my own time!', not at all realizing he needed a flux capacitor to do so.

• In an episode of Family Guy, Peter recalls the time that he "tried to make a time machine out of a De Lorean." The screen then shows a flashback of Peter in a parking lot similar to that of Twin Pines Mall, driving very fast and then smashing into the mall, making a hole in the building, and starting a fire. Shoppers then ran out screaming while on fire, to which Peter responded, "Wow! Everybody in 1955, was on fire. I never knew that!"

• In "The Chaser's War On Everything", Craig Reucassel dressed up as Emmett Brown and with a De Lorean automobile attempted to get the Australian Prime Minister, John Howard, to 'come back with him' so that he could 'go out on top', referring to recent speculation about whether the Prime Minister should have retired at the last election. The De Lorean was however only slightly modified to resemble the one in the films and was right hand drive.

• The Fairly Oddparents showed the De Lorean from Back to the Future II for a brief moment in the episode "The Secret Origin of Denzel Crocker" when Timmy Turner traveled to the 1980s.

• In Duke Nukem: Time to Kill, the De Lorean is hidden in the mines in the western level. Upon finding it, Duke makes a random reference to the movie, usually about leaving his flux capacitor at home.

• Russell Brand frequently mentions the flux capacitor and gigawatts on his radio show.

• Wrestler Frankie Kazarian calls his finisher the "Flux Capacitor", a move which sees him perform a moonsault side slam from the top rope.

• A Flux Capacitor is mentioned in the popular song 'Year 3000' originally sung by the British band Busted which is commonly heard in the U.S. being sung by the American Band Jonas Brothers.

• The Kanye West song "Good Morning" off of the album "Graduation" used the line "Look at the valedictorian scared of the future, while I hop in the Delorean."

• In the Half-Life series of video games, the gravity gun is mentioned to have a flux capacitator which is modified by the Combine weapons confiscation field to have organic management capabilities.

• A Flux Capacitor is mentioned in episodes of both Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.