National Automobile Museum

National Automobile Museum

I mentioned a couple of days ago that the one bright tourist part of our visit to friends in Reno was the National Automobile Museum, what used to be Bill Harrah's car collection. Because I brought my little pocket camera, many of the pictures didn't turn out all that well. If you are passing through Reno, I encourage you to visit. But here are some pictures of interesting, sometimes significant, and occasionally startlingly beautiful pieces of automotive art.

This is the Thomas Flyer, which won the New York to Paris race of 1908. (And yes, there's a centennial memorial web site for it.) And in case you were wondering--no, they didn't drive across the frozen ice as in that ridiculous Tony Curtis movie loosely (very loosely) based on it.


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Something of the simplicity of the designs can be seen from how they kept the chain drive lubricated:


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One of the galleries is done as as 1930s American street, with this rather attractive car, which I think is a Pierce-Arrow:


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The swan hood ornament is quite elegant:


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Of course, items like this don't survive today because of pedestrian collision issues.

If my memory serves me correctly, this rather unusual vehicle is a 1930s Rolls-Royce. They were apparently all custom bodies at the time--and someone with lots of money decided a copper body would be really distinctive:


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Trust me, it was really, really beautiful. The lighting just doesn't convey it well at all. I shudder to think what was required to keep it from developing the green patina.

This was one of those very unusual cars that looks like it belongs in the old Dick Tracy comic strip. It was a prototype that never received enough funding to go into production:


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Some details:


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Here's one of those cars that had real potential to get America headed down the path towards compact, fuel-efficient automobiles. But, of course, a progressive (by wild coincidence, from an Arab-American family) decided that it was Unsafe At Any Speed.


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I have read that the very first technical report from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration--set up because of Nader's efforts--found that the Corvair was about average for small cars of its era. No surprise: Porsche did much of the engineering work on this rear-engine, rear-drive automobile. But Nader had done his job. With a little help from the heavy-handed sorts at GM hiring private detectives to dig up dirt on Nader, the little sedan was dead.