A Back to the Future fan theory positions the DeLorean time machine as the true hero of the story. Movie history is bursting with great time travel tales, but perhaps the most beloved of them all is Back to the Future, released in 1985 and directed by Robert Zemeckis. Michael J. Fox stars as teenage time-traveler Marty McFly in what would become his signature role, alongside Christopher Lloyd as zany inventor Dr. Emmett Brown, in what w0uld also prove to be his defining character.
Back to the Future would spawn two sequels that saw the return of most of the original cast and crew, minus Crispin Glover as Marty's dad George. While a fourth installment has been rumored many times over the years since Back to the Future Part 3, nothing has ever come of those reports, and that's arguably for the best. Back to the Future is one of the best movie trilogies out there, and even without a recent entry, has still managed to stay alive within the pop-culture consciousness.
One way Back to the Future remains alive and kicking is in the form of a seemingly endless amount of continuing discussions about the movies, especially the original. This discussion very much includes the positing of fan theories, including one about the DeLorean time machine. This theory, posted by Reddit user GlutenFree_Paper asserts that the three major times the DeLorean stalls out on Marty during the first Back to the Future aren't an accident, and are instead the timeline itself using the vehicle to stop a potentially paradoxical event from happening.
The first time the DeLorean stalls out in Back to the Future is right after Marty arrives back in 1955. It just happens to do so right near a huge billboard that serves as the perfect hiding place for the vehicle - a vehicle that if Marty had kept driving would certainly draw lots of unwanted attention in town, perhaps leading to government involvement. The second stall out of the DeLorean happens right before lightning strikes the clock tower and sends the DeLorean going 88mph back to 1985, with the car magically starting again at the exact second it needs to, since Doc's calculations weren't exact to the second. If Marty had gone when planned, he'd have missed his chance to get back to the time he belonged in.
The third time the DeLorean stalls is when Marty is back in 1985, hurriedly trying to get to Doc before he's shot by the Libyan terrorists, not knowing Doc had read the message he gave him before leaving 1955. The DeLorean stalls just long enough for the original Marty's DeLorean to head to 1955, preventing the potential paradox of the two Marty McFlys interacting in the same space at the same time. Overall, this theory is surprisingly plausible. After all, while Doc says the Flux Capacitor makes time travel possible, he doesn't elaborate on how. Deeming the device fully sentient would be a bridge too far, but it's possible that whatever allows it to travel through time in Back to the Future has some kind of paradox fail-safe somehow enabled. It could also be argued that the timeline itself is attempting to correct things, and uses the DeLorean for those ends.