Walking around the Lane Motor Museum with director Jeff Lane is a bit like taking a trip through the Chocolate Factory with Willy Wonka. Instead of edible flowers and Wonka bars, this factory is filled with hundreds of cool and colorful vehicles.
"Motorized things have always fascinated me," says Lane, who grew up just outside Detroit but has been a Nashvillian now for more than three decades. "Cars, motorcycles, boats and things like that."
The Lane Motor Museum, housed in what was once the old Sunbeam Bread factory on Murfreesboro Pike, is all about things "like that." The industrial space boasts more than 500 cars, trucks and vehicular whatits from around the world, displayed in a whopping warehouse-size showroom. This gearhead's treasure trove has restoration experts skilled in car culture, a resource library, themed exhibits and even a large play area for kids. "A car collection is just a group of cars," Lane says. "This is a museum…with cars."
He's not Willy Wonka, but Lane—with a goatee, wire-rim glasses and long white hair—looks like he could be the wizard of cars. "I'm a car nut," he admits.
He uses the term "cars" broadly because some of his vehicles would certainly look out of place in the Trader Joe's parking lot—like an oversized oddity from the 1950s, dubbed "Sir Vival." This particular vehicle started as a handsome Hudson Commodore but was remade into a bulked-up, boat-size auto on steroids with a hinged, two-part body meant to "give" in the event of a collision. It looks like something that belongs on a battlefield, in a construction zone, under the sea—or on another planet. The vehicle is so unique that it appeared at the 1964-65 World's Fair in New York.
However, Sir Vival's designer didn't view his creation as a curio. "He wanted to make cars safer," Lane notes. "He wanted Congress to pass laws mandating some of the things he invented," like the rubber bumpers that wrap around Sir Vival.
Just a few yards away is another of the museum's eccentricities, a car powered by a giant propeller. A French-made, one-of-a-kind roadster from the 1930s, the Helicron is the noisiest vehicle in the place when it cranks up, which happens every day at 11 a.m. "It's deafening," Lane says, clearly jazzed about how visitors respond to the unexpected uproar from something that sounds and looks like it could take flight.
The oldest in the museum's wide array of vehicles is a 1909 Parisian taxi that carried troops to the battle line in World War I. And outside is the largest, the amphibious LARC-LX, a behemoth built for the U.S. Army during the Vietnam era. Its tires are 9 feet tall.
The LARC-LX certainly dwarfs the micro cars, single-passenger miniatures mainly from Europe. They were made teeny, Lane points out, to preserve precious materials in the resource-ravaged wake of World War II. "They're fascinating phenomena and pretty foreign to most Americans." He adds that other "car museums" may have a handful of the pint-size Euro oddities, but the Lane has 75!
All of Lane's vehicles have stories on accompanying exhibit cards about how and why they were made and where they came from. "We find out the history," he says. "I always say—a car without a story is just a piece of metal."
The stories preserved in most of the museum's vehicles begin in Europe, which got a jump on America in making automobiles. No slight to Henry Ford, but "Europe was kind of the beginning of the car," Lane says, "because they already had the roads."
Lane's story — and his road — began in Michigan, where his father founded a company that made adhesives for Detroit's auto industry. "My dad was a huge antique car buff. We were always working on cars and going to car shows." When he was 12, his birthday present was an in-pieces British roadster from the 1950s, and young Jeff dove into rebuilding it and restoring it to road-ready glory. The car that started it all, that MG-TF, is now permanently displayed in the museum.
Wanting to escape the chilly winters of the upper Midwest, Lane ventured south to Nashville for college in the '70s, graduating from Vanderbilt with a degree in mechanical engineering. "There wasn't much opportunity in Nashville for a mechanical engineer at the time," he says, so he took a gig as a civilian engineer at Tinker Air Force Base in Oklahoma City and then went back to Michigan to work in his dad's business. He returned to Nashville in 1989, bringing his collection of some 75 vehicles he'd amassed over the years.
After finding a new home for his car collection and remodeling the former bread factory, he opened the Lane Motor Museum in 2003. And it's growing all the time. "We're always looking to add cars," he says. The museum is also constantly coming up with new exhibits, like its latest ones on vehicles popularized in video games, art made from car parts and station wagons.
Nashville and Tennessee have become much more attuned to "car culture" than they were 40 years ago, Lane says. "There's a big BMW club, a Miata club, a British car club…a huge car base. Nissan's here, Bridgestone's here, Volkswagen's in Chattanooga. There's probably more in this region of the world than there is in Detroit now."
Like Willy Wonka shares his chocolate, Lane shares his lifelong love of all things motorized. "By preserving the cars, the stories and the culture, I hope a lot of people will get some of the enjoyment I've gotten," he says. Then he smiles. "I know they will. I've already witnessed it."
"There's a huge car base in Nashville. Nissan's here, Bridgestone's here, Volkswagen's in Chattanooga. There's probably more in this region of the world than there is in Detroit now."
"We find out the history behind the cars. A car without a story is just a piece of metal." Jeff Lane