The Lane Motor Museum in Nashville has a private collection of one off cars so extraordinary that almost no one has seen them
Published on Apr 19, 2026 at 12:26 AM (UTC+4)
by Alessandro Renesis
Last updated on Apr 19, 2026 at 12:26 AM (UTC+4)
Edited by
Mason Jones
The Lane Motor Museum in Nashville, Tennessee is one of the most spectacular car museums in the world.
While other museums focus on big and shiny, or maybe on rare and expensive, Lane Motor is all about uniqueness.
Rarity doesn’t cut it.
Most of these cars are one-offs.
Why forgotten one-offs are easier to acquire than people think
Today, we look at car makers as banks.
Every bolt is accounted for, every prototype is stored or, at worst, sold off.
But nothing is forgotten, nothing is given away, and very little is destroyed unless it needs to be destroyed for legal reasons.
That’s the modern world; but the old world worked differently.
Before the internet, paperwork was exactly that: it was on paper.
And paper gets lost, damaged, forgotten.
One person can’t read another person’s handwriting – that was also a factor, believe it or not.
As a result, a lot of what automakers did before, say, the 1980s and 1990s wasn’t exactly accounted for and taken note of.
This is how you end up with a shrine like the Lane Motor Museum.
This museum in Nashville is like an archive for long-lost one-off vehicles
Hagerty visited the Lane Motor Museum in Nashville, Tennessee.
There are so many one-offs automakers probably forgot about.
We start with a rare (and weird) Scale Mini Cooper that’s about 33 percent smaller than a regular Mini, followed by a strange 1928 Martin Aerodynamic, a very peculiar-looking, New York-made vehicle that looks like it was built back to front.
There are also unknown one-off prototypes from known brands, including Škoda, Citroën, and Panhard.
The museum is also home to one of the world’s largest military vehicles, the LARC-LX.
It’s an amphibious Vietnam-era vehicle, sort of like an aircraft carrier with wheels, but for tanks.
It’s 14 feet wide, 62 feet long, and it weighs around 200,000 pounds (around 100 tons) empty.
Imagine using that to go to the shops.
You can definitely carry a sack of potatoes or two using that.
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After beginning his automotive writing career at DriveTribe, Alessandro has been with Supercar Blondie since the launch of the website in 2022. In fact, he penned the very first article published on supercarblondie.com. He’s covered subjects from cars to aircraft, watches, and luxury yachts - and even crypto. He can largely be found heading up the site’s new-supercar and SBX coverage and being the first to bring our readers the news that they’re hungry for.
