Lane Motor Museum

Most automotive museums are organized around aspiration: the fastest, the most expensive, the most famous. Jeff Lane built his museum around curiosity. The Lane Motor Museum in Nashville occupies a former Sunbeam Bread bakery warehouse near the city's Wedgewood-Houston neighborhood, and within it lives the largest collection of European vehicles in the United States — approximately 550 machines, most of them outside the mainstream collecting conversation entirely.

Lane began collecting in the late 1960s as a teenager, starting with a 1955 MG. What followed over the next four decades was less a traditional collection than an extended investigation into automotive thinking at the margins: amphibious cars, streamliners built for failed land speed attempts, East German two-strokes, French microcars, Czechoslovakian sedans, Italian three-wheelers, and a Peel P50 — widely documented as the world's smallest production car. The museum, founded in 2002 and opened to the public in 2003, and has operated on the same curatorial principle since: if it's interesting and underrepresented, it belongs here.

The experience is deliberately unpretentious. There are no theatrical lighting setups or dramatic reveals. Cars are arranged in a navigable grid, densely packed in the way that a serious collection tends to be when the building wasn't originally designed to house it. The rotating exhibit program brings vehicles out of storage that would be the centerpiece of almost any other museum. Jeff Lane is often present, and he knows the story of every car. The Lane does not attempt to be the most important automotive museum in America. It may, however, be the most fun.