A Pilgrimage to Weird Car Mecca: My First Trip to Lane Motor Museum

Nashville, much like the rest of the American south, is a place chock full of curiosities. It's home to the Grand Ole Opry, a radio-cast country music show that established most of the big names in country music history, and later funded the existing Gaylord Opryland Hotel and Resort, a 172-acre indoor tropical oasis. Music has given Nashville a strong sense of its identity--something I wish we had in my native Atlanta. The streets of downtown and east Nashville--it's own artistic haven--starkly contrast the Grand Ole Opry, but share the same maverick attitude towards music and creativity.

My guess is that Jeff Lane, founder of the Lane Motor Museum in Nashville, shares that same spirit. Only his is directed towards cars.

The Lane Motor Museum is a place I've heard plenty about. Despite living fairly close to Nashville, I've never visited. For me, car museums run the gamut between spectacular and spectacularly-disappointing. You could easily have a room full of common cars, a swamp cooler, and musty carpets accompanying your $20 admission. So I went in with reasonable expectations. All of them went out of the window before I even left the parking garage.

Lane Motor Museum is on the south side of Nashville, off of the Murfreesboro Pike. The area has long been an industrial corridor, experiencing its peak in the mid-20th century. When the Sunbeam Bread factory shut its doors in the mid-80s, along with many other factories on the road, the area went into decline. Not until several decades later--when Jeff Lane purchased the building in 2000--was the area injected with an entirely new energy. One centered not around bread, but around quirky vintage cars.

Tall windows up top let in the right amount of light, and the unfinished walls and exposed roof structure mesh well with the collection of automobiles--a display of industrial engineering at its finest.

You'll find several contemporary vehicles splashed throughout the vast, one-room complex. But mostly, this collection showcases cars from the heyday of automotive ingenuity. France is well-represented here, with selections as exotic as a rotary-powered Citroen and a Dutch rally-outfitted Citroen DM.

Not to be outdone, the Japanese also show well and diversely. Everything from Daihatsu micro-trucks, to the Honda Beat, to a street-legal Honda ATV of sorts is on display in one corner. Many of these were cars I'd only ever seen in early Gran Turismo games. Never ones I thought I'd see in the deep south of all places.

Most impressive are the handful of early Japanese roadsters from Honda and Toyota. A Toyota Sports 800 sits in one corner, while a Honda S800 sits in the other. In addition to the S800, there's also an early-90s Honda Beat, and even a contemporary S660 roadster; all in the appropriate "rising sun" red. 

The collection is housed in a deceptive space--you can see all of it in one 360-degree rotation, so you initially think it's small. But the thing about it is, everything in the room is interesting, it's all packed pretty closely together, and there's a lot of it. Not to mention there are no ropes holding you back. Only good faith keeps patrons from fiddling with the inside and outside of cars on display. When you think about the level the museum staff bestows on the patrons, it really speaks volumes. I respect it tremendously.

As I mentioned earlier, French cars are very well represented here. The first cars to greet you when you walk in are several D-series Citroen sedans. These stylish cars defined what it meant for a car to be "French:" zany steering wheels, narrow rear track, that teardrop shape. This handful of cars shows nicely the development of that style through the 60s and 70s. There's even a rotary-powered Citroen M-35 prototype, which was actually sold to a Citroen customer as a "test vehicle" in the early 70s. The manufacturer was toying with the idea of rotary power, and slated 500 of these prototypes to be built and offered with a lifetime warranty. Due to production issues, though, only 267 were built, and in 1974 Citroen cancelled warranties on all M-35s.

Lane's French collection continues with a Renault 5 Turbo 2 hatchback, and a 1974 DS24 rally car, "La Belle Orange," decked out in the signature Dutch racing color. Possibly the most interesting Citroen on display, though, is the ex-Cogolin Fire Department "two-headed" 2CV. This unique creation, built by coachbuilders Ansart & Teissere, was born from necessity. Firefighters needed a vehicle that could fit down the narrow roads in the area, and valuable time could be wasted having to turn around on such a road. This resulted in the dual-engined, all-front-end car you see today; it actually remained in service for several decades.

Adding to this already unique collection is a display of 14 microcars, arranged from smallest to largest. A plaque written by Lane explains that these cars rose to popularity thanks to inexpensive production cost and ease-of-operation. Additionally, many only required a motorcycle license to operate, and cars like the 1975 Mini-Comtesse on display didn't require a license at all.

Other Notable microcars on display include the Peel P50, which still holds the record for world's smallest passenger car. Peel Engineering, originally a manufacturer of fiberglass boat hulls, built 508 P50s, each powered by a 49cc engine. Bill Minor, a fabricator and Tennessee native, built a working 3/4 scale American Austin. The project took almost 20 years to complete, and is powered by a 10-horsepower, single-cylinder engine.

In the microcar section, you'll begin to notice the artwork that accompanies the cars on display. Advertisements for the Gogomobile and NSU ads set in Brooklyn in the 70s are nearly as interesting as the cars themselves, if only for the common thread of obscurity. A detached gallery is dedicated to displaying these advertisements and artifacts--a fascinating and henceforth underrepresented category of American culture and advertising. It's good to see an illustrated history of MG mounted to a frame on the wall, next to a poster for a 2006 vintage track day at a local racetrack. They may not be spectacular now, but they will be in the future.

Lane Motor Museum motivates the future, even though its exhibits are so firmly rooted in the past. It shows us what innovation looked like; what even pedestrian automobiles can do for the path of the automotive world itself. It's in the details, in the Citroen's complex hydropneumatic suspension, and in the Tatra Aeroluge's complex answer to harsh, eastern European winters. We see what triumphed and what failed, and we can appreciate both.

It's a lot like Nashville itself. An old building, given new and entirely different life. Its cars tell a story, not only of America, but of the world and even of humanity. There are solutions to problems, the tangible, but also masterpieces of design; shapes and colors and lines that capture human emotion in a way that can't be easily explained, but easily appreciated.

For a more in depth look at what lies beneath the brick floor at Lane, check out this article I made on a second trip to the museum.