The Patriarch of the PeculiarWill Crooks (Will Crooks)Will Crooks (Will Crooks)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.This story originally appeared in Volume 35 of Road & Track.Hearst Owned (Hearst Owned)“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.”Will Crooks (Will Crooks)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.”AdvertisementAdvertisementIt’s a fitting tribute for the man known as the car world’s King of Weird. There’s not a dry eye in the room.Where else can you find an Aixam Mega Tjaffer, a Frisky Prince, an electric Renault Dauphine, and a twin-engine Mini all in one place?Will Crooks (Will Crooks)Jeff 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.It’s kind of like driving a gumball machine.Will Crooks (Will Crooks)All of it is the vision of the man whose name is on the building. One guidingprinciple here is “bad ideas that made it.” Whether it’s a two-wheeled car (think about that for a second) 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.AdvertisementAdvertisementIn 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 (not the original) 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.The 55,000 visitors to the museum in 2025 hailed from all over the United States, as well as the rest of the world.Will Crooks (Will Crooks)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.AdvertisementAdvertisementFrom there, we head back to the museum. Among the treasures is a 1938 Harris steam car that looks like a fossilized blue whale (yes, it runs). 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.(left) Like so many startup efforts, the Davis Divan was more promise than product. (top right) Rear-wheel steering means the 1951 Hoffmann handles like a forklift. (bottom right) With 525 vehicles in the collection, it’s important to have an organizing system for all the keys.Will Crooks (Will Crooks)An ongoing conversation in the “Vault,” a sprawling storage space for hundreds of vehicles in the basement, confronts a question: What is the worst-driving car at the museum? Which brings us to the 1951 Hoffmann, the only vehicle here with a track wider than its wheelbase is long.Hearst Owned (Hearst Owned)Off we go, motoring around the parking lot. The Hoffmann looks like it was built by the Minions from Despicable Me. It has three wheels, the lone one in back handling the steering. At no point do you feel like you’re not about to tip over. The car appears comically ugly. But Lane insists, “There is no ugly in my world. Everything has beauty.”(left) Lane in the Sea Lion prototype, almost certainly the world’s only amphibious land speed–&shy;racing car. (right) From inside the Davis Divan, you would never guess that it looks like an antique vacuum cleaner on the outside.Will Crooks (Will Crooks)The Hoffmann was built in war-torn Germany by a shop foreman named Michael Hoffmann. Desperate for transportation, he made the eponymous machine out of junkyard stuff—and it still runs. In a way, it illuminates the mission of the Lane Motor Museum. Nothing is weird for weird’s sake. Everything has a story that brings history to life. Lane remarks, “What’s not beautiful about that?”AdvertisementAdvertisementTime to get stranger. Lane flips me the keys to the 1947 Davis Divan, a car that looks like a Forties vacuum cleaner minus the handle. As I shift through the three on the tree and we go hurtling down an industrial avenue, Lane explains the Davis’s provenance. It all started with Glenn Gordon “Gary” Davis, an industrial designer, used-car salesman, and first-rate shyster.(left) This bumper sticker is a statement, not a question. (top right) In a building full of unique vehicles, the two-wheeled Gyro-X stands out as particularly unusual. (lower right) On the Sir Vival, the passenger compartment is separate from the engine and front wheels.Will Crooks (Will Crooks)Davis claimed he could build a car that would be better in every way than the competitors from Ford and GM. “The new Davis 3-wheeled car is years ahead in true functional design,” the sales literature said. “No car—in any price class—can boast better styling and engineering.” It would do a U-turn at 50 mph, Davis promised. He took cash from starry-eyed investors. When the Divan debuted, it could do none of the things Davis said it would. He built 16 of them before his scheme collapsed and he landed in prison for fraud.“This is the very first one built,” Lane says proudly. In his archives, Lane has a file cabinet with Davis’s drawings and other documentation. Which leads to the question: How does he find this stuff? “A lot of it finds me,” he says. If there’s something weird out there, and no one can take care of it, people know who to call. But other stuff—like the Davis Divan—Lane seeks out. He has a half-million-dollar annual budget for acquisitions, a budget that can be stretched when he sees something he wants.Okay, there’s a lot of weird in this story, but it doesn’t get more visually baffling than the 1957 Aurora, an attempt to make “America’s safest automobile.”Will Crooks (Will Crooks)Like the one-of-a-kind 1967 Gyro-X—the next step up our escalator of eccentricity. The museum’s official literature describes the Gyro-X in these words: “The brainchild of Alex Tremulis, famous stylist and Automobile Hall of Fame inductee, and Thomas Summers, a gyroscope expert, the Gyro-X is a two-wheeled, gyroscopically stabilized prototype vehicle constructed in 1967. Proposed as a possible solution for future transportation, the two-wheeled vehicle provided many thought-provoking ideas for revolutionizing transportation.”AdvertisementAdvertisementWith less friction and drag, a two-wheeled vehicle could be more efficient than a four-wheeled car, and a 3000-rpm powered gyro built into the nose could keep the car from tipping over. The canoe-shaped vehicle uses a Mini CooperS–sourced 1.3-liter inline-four in the back for power. “They spent, supposedly, three-quarters of a million dollars to build it,” Lane says. “They were just wild-crazy smart. But they couldn’t get the car to work very good.”When someone asks you if you want to drive a BMW Isetta 300, you say yes.Will Crooks (Will Crooks)When Lane found the Gyro-X in 2011, it was a rusty shell and without its gyro. Enter Michael Hüby, the museum’s German-born master technician and restoration specialist, whom Lane describes as “our wizard around here.”“One day,” Hüby says, “Jeff came in and said, ‘I want the Gyro-X to function. I want to drive it across the country.’” The museum hired a manufacturer in Italy to build the gyro (it cost a fortune). Hüby spent five years rebuilding the car. He was happy to do it, even if the vehicle never did set off across the U.S.A.An expansion to about 75,000 square feet will be open by the time you read this, allowing more cars from the “Vault” to be on display.Will Crooks (Will Crooks)“If not for Jeff,” Hüby says, “all of these stories and all of these artifacts would fade away.”AdvertisementAdvertisementBringing the gyroscope up to speed takes an hour (who can imagine why this idea didn’t sell?). At the touch of a dashboard button, two kickstands swing into the body and—voilà!—the single-seater balances on its two wheels. When I get in, the car rocks back and forth like a rowboat in a lake but never tips over. The gyro whirling near my feet looks and sounds like a basketball-sized nuclear reactor. Hüby puts the car in gear for me, and when I ease off the clutch, the Gyro-X motors across the museum floor. I only get about 25 feet, but it turns out I am only the fourth person ever to drive it. My take? Weird.The gyroscope that keeps the Gyro-X from tipping over took five years to rebuild and cost a fortune.Will Crooks (Will Crooks)Of all the cars in the museum, few capture the imagination like the Helicron. This would be the pièce de résistance. Our booming crescendo. And boy, does it boom. As I stand in the parking lot, Lane sparks the engine, which erupts into a deafening roar as the propeller whirls into a blur.Yes, the Helicron is a propeller-powered car, and a fine example of a terrible idea. “In the Twenties,” Lane explains, speaking loudly over the racket, “aviation was new, and airplanes were starting to carry passengers and mail. People were fascinated. Some believed that propellers were the future not just of flight but of cars and trains.”You’ve heard of the flying car, but what about a driving plane? The Helicron is the answer to that unlikely question.Will Crooks (Will Crooks)Lane is the world’s foremost collector of propeller-powered vehicles—the museum has cars, bicycles, and even boats. Years ago, a friend found the shell of the Helicron, and Lane dove into a years-long research and rebuilding process. The car was originally created in France in 1931. No one knows who built it or where it got its name.AdvertisementAdvertisementAs we motor down Highway 41, strangers stop in their tracks. People cannot believe their eyes. From the driver’s seat, the Helicron performs like, well, a propeller-powered car. The only thing that functions like it would in a typical car is the brake pedal. The steering turns the single rear wheel; if you want to turn, you need to think ahead. The throttle handle is mounted on the outside of the car so the driver can jump out and push up hills while keeping control of the power.Blake Larson’s Futura Waimea is based on a concept sketch commissioned by Henry J. Kaiser to promote the use of aluminum in car manufacturing.Will Crooks (Will Crooks)The decibels are almost shocking. As Lane points out, nobody would get run over by this car unless they wanted to, because it is so loud. As I throttle toward the 40-mph top speed, I glance at Lane in the passenger’s seat. His white locks blow wildly in the wind.A 2013-built Peel Trident replica. You don’t step into this vehicle as much as you enter a new state of reality.Will Crooks (Will Crooks)Who else but Jeff Lane would let someone like me drive a one-of-a-kind propeller-powered car that’s hard to control, on city roads? Who spends a quarter of a century building a museum dedicated to weirdness and failure, only to turn it into a successful tribute to automotive history that lures visitors from around the world?The Lane Motor Museum is a great idea inspired by a multitude of bad ideas. I’m reminded of the tribute at Lane’s retirement lunch: Weird is wonderful. . . . 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