World's biggest car museum: La cité de l'automobile, in Mulhouse, France

520 cars from 98 brands, incuding the world's largest collection of Bugatti's (123) including three of the 7 Royales

the next 3 biggest museums are all in Germany, the Audi, Porsche, and Mercedes museums

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Collection_Schlumpf.jpg

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one of the most beautiful collections of motorcycles in France, Jean Luc Gaignard's

http://tcaplain.blogspot.fr/2011/10/jean-luc-gaignard.html

http://lesmotosmythologiques.blogspot.com/2016/03/v-behaviorurldefaultvmlo.html

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Hard to believe any museum with this incredible aesthetic and collection could go out of business... but they made a bad decision early on, they built it somewhere no one would travel to.

From the elegant above designs (pure art)

to the awesome below

the Lawman, unlike all other Mopars, was never sold or processed through a dealership. Even the cars given to the head honchos were processed... but not this hemi dragster that went worldwide on a USO tour to show dragsters to the military. It was handed over to Al Eckstrand, and has never been titled

to the outrageous crazy

if you don't understand why this little black car is outrageous and crazy, try and buy one, or race one.

But it was closed for good and turned into office spaces in Dec 2016 and there's not telling what happened to all the cool inventory and displays

 http://autoweek.com/article/classic-cars/walter-p-chrysler-museum-closing-december-good-time
http://www.hotrod.com/articles/mopp-0804-walter-p-chrylser-museum-tour/ 

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someone found a Kissel and donated it to the Wisconsin Auto Museum, and it's still as found. Well, it's also likely there are zero chances any parts exist to repair it, only 150 are thought to exist, and 25 of them are IN the museum

http://carzhunt.blogspot.com/2016/03/six-days-on-road-day-3-part-1.html

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Long Island car and carriage museum at Stony Brook, New York

http://carzhunt.blogspot.com/2016/04/horsepower-last-friday-was-april-fools.html

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the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry extensively damaged the Spirit of America when they had it on loan from Craig Breedlove, and they didn't fess up about it, so he's sueing them, and the lawsuit was just given the greenlight by a federal judge.

the Museum of Science and Industry contacted Breedlove and requested him to loan the vehicle to it for an exhibition in 1965 (that's right, over 50 years ago). The two parties made an oral agreement, with conditions of the loan being:

the Spirit of America would not be shown commercially anywhere other than at the Museum without Breedlove’s prior written approval;

the Spirit of America would be made available in the event that a motion picture about the record runs of the vehicle was going to be made; and

in the event that the Spirit of America was to be removed from exhibition, it would returned to Mr. Breedlove at his request.

 When it was returned to him in 2015, he discovered that it had been damaged, reports the Chicago Tribune.

Damage included exterior panels that no longer fit, stretched intake duct mountings for the jet engine and graffiti where schoolchildren carved their initials in the aluminum finish, the lawsuit said.

In addition, Breedlove said the vehicle’s frame had been cut and “unprofessionally” rewelded, and the driver’s seat was missing. The car was taken to a professional restoration shop, which estimated repair costs at $395,000.

Other missing parts included water, oil and fuel tanks and the Spirit’s historic turnaround dolly.

Previously the court wasn't convinced that Breedlove had a claim, and then, he shoved it to them with the documents that listed the standards and best practices from the American Association of Museums (which the Museum of Science and Industry is part of).

That, apparently, was what the judge needed to see to let the museum get taken to court.

Steven Young, a Los Angeles-based attorney representing Breedlove, said Monday the AAM standards "made clearer to the court" that the museum was negligent in its handling of the vehicle. "They didn't live up to museum standards," Young said.

"Stewardship is the careful, sound and responsible management of that which is entrusted to a museum's care. Possession of collections incurs legal, social and ethical obligations to provide proper physical storage, management and care for the collections and associated documentation, as well as proper intellectual control."

http://jalopnik.com/former-land-speed-record-holder-to-sue-museum-for-fucki-1791067864
http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/ct-jet-car-breedlove-0110-biz-20170109-story.html

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Toyota USA Automobile Museum in Torrence has an online 360 tour

use this page
or this page if you want more info

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Toyota Automobile Museum tour on video, for those of us that can't travel there

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Looks like the Hudson Museum in Shipshewana Indiana, Eldon Hostetler's collection, may have closed since Halloween 2016, he passed away in Jan 2016

Eldon Hostetler surprised his community and his world when he left the Amish religion. The 1st of 13 kids, (and that is a lot of siblings) he had the natural gift to be an inventor and entrepreneur, and eventually stopped creating new stuff but only after  with more than 65 patents to his name,

He had a formal education until the 8th grade graduation (not unusual at the time) and switched from Amish to Mennonite.

His Grandpa had tractors and threshing machines, and he helped his grandfather renovate machinery. He was Amish, but he traded his steam engine in for a gasoline-fired tractor a 20-40 Huber tractor.

The tractor went three times as fast as the steam engine would go in high gear, and it pulled a wagon that he used to haul a 50-gallon drum with his fuel and oil and things on it, for hundreds of miles around the country doing threshing.

Hostetler said that when he was 18, he was helping his Grandpa Shrock in his shop one day when his grandpa told him if he promised never to tell his mother where I got the money, he would loan me $350 to buy my first car, a 1938 Hudson,”

Hostetler said. “I was the only person in our community who had a car, and so I hauled a lot of Amish people around. They paid me so much per mile and gave me gas ration stamps so I could buy gas. It was during World War II, and I couldn’t get tires. I had to recap those tires until I couldn’t recap them anymore.”

So he traded in the 1938 Hudson for a 1940 model with 27,000 miles, the second of many cars he owned in the coming decades.

In 2005 Eldon donated land, a building and endowment fund to start the Hostetler’s Hudson Auto Museum, building the largest collection of rare and unusual Hudsons.

http://millerstewartfuneralhome.com/OBITS/EldonHostetler.html
https://www.tripadvisor.com/Attraction_Review-g37526-d1422373-Reviews-Hostetler_s_Hudson_Auto_Museum-Shipshewana_Indiana.html
The Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/HostetlersHudsonMuseum/ stopped posting in 2010

https://www.hemmings.com/magazine/hcc/2006/12/Eldon-Hostetler/1382310.html

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the Blackhawk museum recently had a blogger (not me) go for a photo tour, here is the sight at the entrance:

see the whole gallery at http://www.legendarycollectorcars.com/2015/11/blackhawk-automobile-museum/

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