Jeff Lane's collection is the Louvre of the weird car world. The cake is ready for cutting. Now it is time for Jeff Lane to make a speech at his retirement lunch. Lane, 65, established the Lane Motor Museum in Nashville, Tennessee, 24 years ago, and he’s been running it ever since. Now he’s ready to let go of the reins. He can’t get through a sentence without choking up.
"I just wanna say thanks to everybody," Lane says to the crowd of about 60 friends and employees in the museum’s break room. "It’s been great to work with such great people. You have made my life a lot of fun."
A longtime friend named John Williamson stands up to speak. "Jeff has a filter," he says. "He only lets the weird in. Weird is wonderful. Or a certain kind of weird is wonderful. And Jeff is that kind of weird." Turning to Lane, he says, "You’re the heart of this place. And you built the team that’ll keep that heart beating. It’s an amazing creation. And you’re an amazing person. I love you."
View Price on AmazonJeff Lane has probably had more fun playing with cars than anyone. He hails from the Detroit area, from a family that runs an automotive sealants and adhesives manufacturing company. Lane came to Nashville in the Seventies to study mechanical engineering at Vanderbilt.
When he started the Lane Motor Museum in 2002, few noticed. A quarter-century later, it’s become an institution, a showplace for some of the strangest machinery ever built. Fifty-five thousand people visited in 2025. The new director, Chris Brewer, is helping oversee a huge expansion. By the time you read this, the museum will have roughly 75,000 square feet of display space, and the collection of 525 vehicles is already outgrowing it.
All of it is the vision of the man whose name is on the building. One guiding principle here is “bad ideas that made it.” Whether it’s a two-wheeled car or an amphibious land speed racer, there are many head-scratchers here. Yet each is a historic artifact with an important story to tell, an industrial art piece that becomes more interesting as you learn more about its origin story.
In honor of Lane’s retirement, Road & Track showed up in March with a mission: to pick the strangest vehicles in this temple of oddities and take them onto the streets of Nashville. Lane is game. "How can we understand these cars if we don’t drive them?" he asks. The plan is to start small—literally—and build toward a crescendo of weirdness.
So begins the strangest assignment in my 25 years of automotive journalism. Until you’ve driven a Peel Trident microcar through urban traffic, surrounded by speeding lifted pickups, you can’t know the clamping strength of your butt cheeks. When the Trident appeared in the Sixties, it was the smallest two-seat car ever put into production. It can be lifted off the ground by a single person. The bubble car’s buzzing Vespa engine has all the oomph of a hair dryer as I throttle down the Murfreesboro Pike with Lane next to me in the passenger’s seat.
When we arrive at our destination, Lane’s favorite kebab shop, he takes over and drives the bubble car through the front doors into the dining room, parking next to the table where he will eat a gyro plate. The King of Weird can get away with stuff like that. And the day’s antics are only beginning.
From there, we head back to the museum. Among the treasures is a 1938 Harris steam car that looks like a fossilized blue whale. There’s also an example of the largest amphibious cargo vehicle built for the U.S. Army. Called the LARC-LX, it is over 60 feet long and nearly 20 feet tall, with nine-foot-high tires that cost about $30,000 apiece—and Lane has indeed driven it through downtown Nashville.
Source: roadandtrack.com
