A hundred cars sit still in a dim warehouse, with hundreds more hiding beneath the floorboards.
Some of the cars only have three wheels.
Some only have one door.
Others are so small, most people can’t fit in them anymore. One’s even in two pieces.
It’s not a junkyard, though.
It’s a museum.
At Nashville’s Lane Motor Museum, parked off Murfreesboro Pike, visitors won’t find common Camaros or Corvettes.
Instead, this gallery houses the uncommon and unusual: mini microcars, obscure European vehicles, homemade automotive contraptions and exclusive prototypes.
Each car on display – however old, odd or obtuse – gets a chance to be restored, maintained and in the spotlight.
Jeff Lane, founder and president of the museum, searches for cars that tell stories.
“A car without a story is just a piece of metal,” he said, shrugging.
So, what story do these cars tell?
A car with three wheels sought to avoid French vehicle regulations.
A car with one door hoped to depression-era transportation affordable.
A microcar jokingly called a limo, after being a size up from the previous model.
A two-piece car that served as an inventor’s hope of making cars safer.
It’s an auto-biography of how people across the world have tackled problems of transportation, economy and war.
General manager David Yando has been with Lane since the museum's inception in 2003.
He sees how visitors look past the metal and into the history of the cars.
“People come and find that there’s more to a car museum than just mechanical stuff,” Yando said. “We try to teach a little bit of economics and geopolitics and history; we try to make it fun.”
Lane said there are a lot of ways a car can be interesting.
“Just because it’s beautiful doesn’t mean it’s interesting. And a lot of cars are not very interesting to look at but tell very interesting stories,” he said. “Some of these cars, you look at them, and they don’t make sense. But when they were built, they really did make sense.”
The motor museum puts these oddball automobiles on display for visitors to drive deeper into how and why these cars made it on the road.
A propeller powered car? In the 1920s, it made sense.
“They don’t stop very well. They don’t start very well either,” Lane said. “But on open, empty roads, and there weren’t stop signs either, they did really well.”
Lane’s personal donation started the museum in 2003 when he consolidated his 70-car collection into one building.
Though the collection has grown to over 550 vehicles, Lane hasn’t strayed from the core qualities that started his collection: history and oddity.
His first car was a 1955 MG TF, a restoration project that became his companion as he traveled around the country.
“There’s a lot of history around MG,” he said. "They really were the start of getting Americans interested in sports cars.”
A Detroit-area native, Lane attended Vanderbilt University in 1978 for mechanical engineering.
He spent time at Tinker Air Force Base in Oklahoma City, and back in Michigan at his family’s auto supply business, before settling in Nashville in 1989.
During the 90s, he set off down the road of car collecting.
A focus of his original collection was microcars.
“I was always a big fan of microcars, and the microcar people did a lot of very innovative, sometimes crazy things,” he said.
Lane’s collecting also turned towards Europe.
His European star car was a Tatra T-87, a classic World War II-era Czech car.
Today, Tatras are a focus of the museum alongside other vintage European cars like Citroen 2CVs.
The museum touts one of the largest collections of European cars in the world.
“In our first year, we were probably 70% European visitors because the European magazines picked up on what we were doing,” Yando said.
But as locals began to check in on the growing collection, all kinds of new visitors showed up.
“We get tons of people coming in just because they heard that they should come here.
They’re not car people, they’re not looking for anything, they don’t know what to expect,” Yando said. “A lot of people come because they think they’re supposed to and they find there’s not just metal things out there, but little snips of history ... we got 500 cars, we can tell a lot of stories.”
Education director Rex Bennett’s job is to tell these stories.
Bennett looks deeper into why each car is important, helping change how visitors look at each car.
“People like unusual things,” Bennett said. “So we explain why the car’s special, why it’s here, what we do to fix it, we can tell them this one goes in the water this one has a propeller. And it satisfies that curiosity.”
No matter how much a vehicle stretches the bounds of what can be considered a car, Bennett hopes to still highlight the familiarity in each car.
What’s displayed as an artifact today was, at some point, someone’s daily driver or passion project, as familiar as an F-150 in Nashville.
The museum houses dozens of rare cars and 10 one-off prototypes.
For people looking for a specific make and model, the Lane Motor Museum might be their only shot in North America to see it.
Even video game designers have traveled to the Lane.
An exhibit is currently set up to showcase their cars that have been used as a model for games such as Forza, Gran Turismo and Grand Theft Auto.
“Some of our cars are not only like the ones you see in the video game but are the exact car you see in the video game,” Bennett said. "They come and take about a million pictures."
At its core, the museum is an archive.
It captures automotive history from the world’s smallest car – a Peel P50 – to the largest amphibious military vehicle – a LARC-LX.
“To capture the stories is the important part,” Lane said. “Most people don’t write stories down. Those stories are gone.”
Cars are more than asphalt-bound machines. They can define a region’s economic capabilities or represent an individual’s lifestyle, Lane explained.
“To some people, cars are an appliance,” he said. “Are we ever going to be without cars?”
Lane’s collection answers that question, providing an intimate look at how people have dealt with societal events and problems.
A Citroen converted to run on coal is a different perspective on the civilian struggles of Nazi-occupied France.
A Skoda tells the story of Czech immigrants holding onto their home country while moving to Chicago.
A scooter with a homemade front seat tells the story of a married couple’s compromise on transportation.
A foldable motorbike – the Yike Bike – tells the story of a company trying to revolutionize short commutes in modern cities.
An airplane-inspired car dubbed “Fascination” tells the story of an innovative aeronaut’s many attempts to develop an ultra-economical car.
“Cars are inevitable,” Lane said.
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This article was written by Matt Sinofsky
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