Well this genre in particular is Outrun, which is associated loosely with the car game, driving fast and primarily..Kavinksy.

Now when anyone thinks of the stereotype of the 00's of any part of the 20th century each decade is renowned for a primary thing (in western murican culture)

From first flight to the First World War to that space inbetween with flappers and prohibition and the Great Depression onto the Second World War and then to 50's cars and perfect white picket fence family's to NAM or the Space race to 70's disco to 80's electronics and future due to the Cold War where everything in the human race had accelerated to a point where we were about to shred each other's faces off with a nuclear winter.

Rockets had been around for a while, rocket launches for space missions 20 years before (imagine you are in 1980) were watched by the whole family. Comics and films had saturated the place with dreams of living on Mars and finding new worlds and that the year 2000 we were going to have flying cars and space travel for all. So when the car arrived in 81 it didn't make an impact, but after gaining attention in the film, people wouldn't stop talking about it but not exactly enough for people to be rushing out the buy one.

So only in some form of nostalgia when people sum up the 80's as if they could only pick a few big moments with 5 pictures it would probably these says have a some cold war reference, a brick phone, something neon/brash colouring mostly related to fitness videos, a cassette tape and a DMC-12 delorean.

Conclusion: the DeLorean at the time was not exactly some sort of icon, only when people started to love looking back and only picking the best bits out do they arrive at the delorean when in general the 80's was very different. Much like this genre of music and style, it's an alternative universe where RoboCop is your local PD, a trip to Mars is super cheap and driving on the highway at night listening the King of the streets is normal.