Marty meets his friend, scientist Dr. Emmett "Doc" Brown, late at night in the parking lot of a deserted shopping mall, where Doc reveals a time machine made from a modified DeLorean DMC-12. The vehicle's time displacement is powered by plutonium, which supplies 1.21 gigawatts of power to a device Doc calls the "flux capacitor." Doc explains that the car travels to a pre-set date upon reaching 88 miles per hour; as an example, he enters the date November 5, 1955, the date he came up with the concept of the flux capacitor.