Must-See Car Museums in the U.S.

Home to the LeMay collection, which once contained an astounding 3000 vehicles, America’s Car Museum lies south of Seattle in Tacoma. The collection is quite diverse, including everything from a Peking-to-Paris Citroën 2CV and a Duesenberg SJ to a 1983 Mercury Colony Park station wagon. For a measly three bucks extra, you can partake in the grand old American tradition of slot-car racing on site.

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Motorcycle aficionado, get thyself to Leeds, Alabama, conveniently located outside Birmingham. Fans of historic Lotus cars will find a lot to like here, but the real story is the bikes. They’ve got 97 Harley-Davidsons alone. That’s enough to fill a lesser museum, but it represents only about a ninth of the bikes on display at any given time. There are 216 manufacturers from 20 countries represented. If you subscribe to the notion that half the wheels are at least 11 times the fun, a trip to ‘Bama has gotta be on your schedule.

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Blackhawk is perhaps best known outside the Bay Area as the place where a down-on-his-luck Tim Armstrong picked up donated microwaves and refrigerators before his band Rancid found success with “Salvation,” a song detailing his time manning a Salvation Army truck. But the ritzy enclave in the far East Bay community of Danville also is home to a well-regarded museum with a heavy automotive component. Machines on display range from a 1911 Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost to a 1958 Pininfarina-designed Lancia Flaminia coupe to a ’70 Dodge Challenger convertible.

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Porsche and racing go together like Bitcoin and volatility. While the latter combo doesn’t have its own dedicated museum (though arguably it should) the former does, and it’s worth the cost of admission. Started as a fancy display in a Porsche dealership, the now world-famous 35,000-square-foot museum features some of history’s most prolific competition Porsches alongside a wide array of open-cockpit race cars from the early 20th century.

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Founded as the Towe Ford Museum in the 1980s, the California Automobile Museum has expanded its mission and collection to embrace other marques. While the joint’s still rather centered around American antiques, Malcolm Forbes’s old Lamborghini Countach resides there, as does a Kawasaki KZ1000P motorcycle from the TV show CHiPs. If you find yourself in California’s capital on the third Sunday of any given month, you can hitch a ride around town in a classic car from the museum. Saoirse Ronan cosplay is completely optional.

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Drag racing birthed some of the 20th century’s most radical racing machines, and Don Garlits spent much of the sport’s early history at the forefront of innovation. He was one of the very first to explore the power potential of Chrysler’s Hemi engine and the first to successfully develop and campaign a Top Fuel dragster with the engine located behind the driver (after a clutch explosion claimed part of a foot). The man has thus accumulated a very long career’s worth of memorabilia and landmark automobiles. Next time you’re at Daytona, make the trip over to Ocala and pay the place a visit.
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Henry Ford’s name is synonymous with cars—duh—but the Henry Ford situated alongside the Ford Motor Company’s Dearborn, Michigan, campus is more than a paean to the automobile. Myriad displays, including the outdoor Greenfield Village and its smattering of historical buildings and re-creations of historical buildings such as the Wright brothers’ bicycle shop and the lab where Nikola Tesla worked, take you on a journey through the dawn of an industrialized, mobile America in what feels like a life-size diorama. One can take a stroll through Buckminster Fuller’s visionary Dymaxion House, marvel at Brobdingnagian steam engines, see a real live Ford GT40 in all its low-slung glory, and take a ride in a Model T.

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Who cares if you’ve been bored with American open-wheel racing since the CART/IRL split? You’ve still got eight decades of astonishing motorsport and innovation to mine, and Indy’s museum has you covered. Gawk at Ray Harroun’s Marmon Wasp, winner of the first Indy 500. Bask in the presence of the all-conquering Meyer-Drake Offenhauser four-banger. And, for a mere eight bucks, you can take a narrated lap of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway itself.

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If you’re into sub-sub-subcompacts, Jeff Lane has your digits. The microcar aficionado has put together one of the most compelling collections in the country for fans of the offbeat and bizarre. His devotion to weirdness is so complete that he went to the trouble of building a replica of Bucky Fuller’s ill-fated Dymaxion car. Other gems at his Nashville museum include a Reliant Ant, England’s answer to the Vespa-based Piaggio Ape, and the bonkers, propeller-powered 1932 Helicron.

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Larz Anderson got on the car-collecting tip early. He and wife Isabel picked up an 1899 Winton 4-hp Runabout and promptly found themselves hooked. By the time Isabel died in 1948, they’d amassed a sizable collection of automobiles, and today the carriage house where their collection was kept is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. It is also home to the Larz Anderson Auto Museum, where you can have a gander at that ’99 Winton, a Radford-bodied ’59 Rolls-Royce shooting brake, and a 1924 Renault Torpedo nicknamed Polliwog.

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Once upon a time, Reno was a pretty happening town, the most important city in Nevada even. But with Las Vegas’s rise and the advent of Native American casinos in California, the Biggest Little City in the World fell on hard times. Slow to recover from the housing crisis, Reno became a haven for ski bums priced out of Tahoe by the tech-bro contingent and home to some artsy-fartsy types whose vehicles presumably broke down on the way home from Burning Man, so they decided to stick around. As a result, Reno found a new, hipper lease on life. It’s also got one don’t-miss holdover from the old days: the National Automobile Museum, which rose from the ashes of casino magnate Bill Harrah’s car collection. What more do you need to know? Well, they’ve got a gold-plated De Lorean and Ed “Big Daddy” Roth’s seminal Beatnik Bandit. Want more? There are 207 other cars to choose from. We’re sure you’ll find one or two to geek out over.

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The Nethercutt Collection, located in the Sylmar neighborhood of Los Angeles, features more than 250 rare, antique, and collectible cars along with an assortment of antique automotive memorabilia. Split between two buildings, it even includes an outdoor exhibit that showcases two early 1900s locomotives. Its founder, the late J.B. Nethercutt, began collecting and restoring cars in 1956 and would go on to log a record six wins at the Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance. Every vehicle in the collection is kept in like-new condition which makes this museum just that much more impressive.

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Funky, famous, and fabulous, the Petersen Automotive Museum has become a world-renowned automotive and cultural icon. From motorcycles to movie cars, the museum has something for everyone. If the hundreds of vehicles on display isn’t enough, Petersen also offers visitors access to an additional 250 cars in its vault along with permanent exhibits such as the Cars Mechanical Institute. It also hosts regular virtual and in-person events that include Cars and Coffee with cool guys such as Magnus Walker.

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Philadelphia exudes the gritty, neo-cosmopolitan vibe that was so cruelly steamrolled out of San Francisco by the tech invasion over the past couple of years. Its many museums—everything from fine art to history to medical oddities—have long been a draw to the cradle of American democracy. If you’re heading to Philly to gawk, put the Simeone Foundation Automotive Museum on your list. The collection includes everything from a 1913 Mercer Raceabout, the Corvette of its day, to the only unrestored Shelby Cobra Daytona coupe left in the world.

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The Volo Auto Museum is a grab bag of interesting stuff thrown together, including old heavy equipment, a fiberglass Harrier jump-jet replica used in both True Lies and The Avengers—it gets smashed when the Hulk rampages aboard the Helicarrier—and Zsa Zsa Gabor’s ’79 Rolls-Royce Corniche. They’ve also got old jukeboxes, and a torture museum is on the way because, hey, why not?

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