Fate of the 1990 Ford Tempo

My family's 1990 Ford Tempo met an untimely end over the summer of 2000 when I was rear-ended in Longview, Washington, by an uninsured driver, ending my plan to use it as a time machine for my no-budget remake of Back to the Future. The car was declared totaled, and I took these pictures at the shop it was towed to when I went to clean it out (all of the time machine decoration was still inside, and some of it belonged to a friend). When I was rear-ended, I was stopped in traffic, and was pushed into the car in front of me, resulting in some minor damage to the front of the car, but most of the damage was in the back.

The Honda Civic that rear-ended me didn't hit me squarely. I was stopped in the left lane and I think the driver tried to go around me but was going too fast. This put all the rear damage on the right side of the car. Looking straight from the back, it didn't look too bad.

The damage looked much worse on the right side. Even this picture doesn't really do it justice; the right rear quarter panel was actually pushed forward into the rear door, jamming both passenger side doors shut. This was why this 10-year-old car was declared totaled.

1990 Ford Tempo Time Machine

During my senior year of high school, I had the idea to make my own version of Back to the Future with my friends, using my family's 1990 Ford Tempo as the time machine. I wrote a script, but we didn't have time to pursue it until after graduation, when we did decorate the car.

A Ford Tempo is a poor stand-in for a DeLorean, but it is the best we could do.

We didn't do much with the front of the car, aside from stringing a wire over the hood. The more interesting modifications were in the back.

A  large stereo speaker with an aluminum grill was strapped to the flat trunk lid, and faired in with black cardboard. Flexible hose from an old canister vacuum led through the rear windows, blanked with more cardboard, with more vacuum piping for exhaust.

We even made a futuristic "OUTATIME" license plate from aluminum foil.

I'm not actually sure if all this stuff would have stayed in place if we had driven the car like this. We never actually got that far.

The interior also had some modifications for time travel.

A plasma globe between the front seats stood in for the flux capacitor. it was plugged into a power inverter so it would actually light up in the car.

We also built a control panel, mostly out of random electrical junk, old watches, and a broken spellchecker. Some of the lights did light up, though, and I actually still use the graphing calculator. Unfortunately, the car met an untimely end soon after this, and we never actually made the movie, but looking back I think building the time machine would have still been the most fun part of the project anyway.