Entry No. 4 — the Nashville file — filed under: history
Lane Motor Museum
Founder Jeff Lane started with 70-80 personal cars stuffed into a former bakery; the collection is now 500+ mostly-European vehicles including propeller-driven cars, amphibious cars, three-wheelers, and 23 Tatras — the kind of car nobody else bothered to save.
The story
Founder Jeff Lane did not set out to build another polish-and-chrome museum full of red Ferraris and American muscle cars. He began by collecting the misfits of vehicular history—70 or 80 oddballs stuffed into a former industrial bakery on Murfreesboro Pike. Over the decades, that personal obsession ballooned into a collection of over 500 mostly European and Asian vehicles, with roughly 150 parked on the main floor at any given time. It is easily the largest collection of European cars in the United States, dedicated entirely to the strange ideas that automotive history largely left behind.
Walk the floor and you will not see standard commuter cars; you will see engineering dead ends and unhinged experiments. The floor holds propeller-driven automobiles, amphibious vehicles built to drive directly off land and into deep water, three-wheeled microcars, and a fleet of 23 Czech Tatras—rear-engine, air-cooled machines that almost no other museum in the country bothered to preserve. It is a sanctuary for the vehicles that mainstream car culture ignored.
What it's like
You step into a sprawling, bright display hall that still carries the open architectural footprint of its commercial bakery past. You do not need to care about horsepower or torque to get pulled in; the surreal shapes—tiny bubble-topped microcars, wooden chassis with aircraft engines—do all the heavy lifting. While the main floor rotates roughly 150 cars, the move here is planning ahead and grabbing a spot on the weekend Vault tour, which takes you down into the basement overflow where hundreds more machines sit tucked away.
The move: Wander the main floor arguing over which absurd microcar or Amphicar you'd actually daily-drive, then book the weekend 'Vault' basement tour to see the overflow storage most visitors never reach.
- 📍 South Nashville / Elm Hill
- 💸 $
- ⚡ Up for anything
- 🌗 Indoors
Where: 702 Murfreesboro Pike, Nashville, TN 37210
Hours: Added 2026-07-20 — confirm current hours before you go.
Pair it with
- The Forge Nashville — Walk two blocks down Murfreesboro Pike to shift from admiring vintage mechanical curiosities to watching modern makers weld and work in a 23,000-square-foot non-profit shop space.
- Tennessee Central Railway Museum — Keep the vintage transit theme running 1.5 miles up the road by checking out restored diesel locomotives and rail artifacts.
- Greenwood Cemetery — Head less than a mile away to quiet down and explore the historic 1887 grounds of one of Nashville's first African American cemeteries.
Good to know
Where is the museum located?
Lane Motor Museum is located at 702 Murfreesboro Pike in the South Nashville / Elm Hill neighborhood, housed in a former bakery building.
How many cars can I see on a normal visit?
The museum displays around 150 vehicles on its main floor at any given time out of a total collection of over 500.
What is the Vault tour?
The Vault tour is a weekend basement tour that gives visitors access to the museum's lower level, where the rest of the 500-plus vehicle overflow collection is stored.
What types of vehicles are in the collection?
The museum specializes in European and Asian cars, focusing on unusual vehicles like propeller-driven cars, amphibious craft, three-wheelers, and Tatras.
Plan a visit & invite your people →
Further reading: Official site · Wikipedia · Reddit
last checked: 2026-07-20