Free automotive museums are great. There are not that many options, but there are a few, usually with limited hours, and in most cases, donations are encouraged or at least greatly appreciated. 

Like everything else in the world, there are always exceptions. For the vast majority of the world’s automotive museums, admission is a necessity. At Miles Through Time Automotive Museum, we inevitably have someone come in and give us a hard time about being charged to look at some “old cars.”   

I would say 95% of the time, this is exactly how it is phrased. “I don’t need to pay to look at a bunch of old cars, most of which I used to own.” 

It used to bother me when people didn’t understand what I was trying to do with the museum. A room with a few old cars is about as far from the reality of the museum as you can get and still refer to the cars.

Anymore, I’d rather the people who complain before they even enter the museum, not even go in. Within the last two weeks, we had a guy complain about the price, but ultimately he still went into the museum.

Two hours later, he came out and said, where is the rest of it? Apparently, 130 full-size vehicles, 5,000+ model cars and hundreds of other historical artifacts in four separate galleries was still not enough. 

It’s okay though, because the positive interactions and feedback completely drowned out the random negative ones from people who I believe their default on life is just set to ornery. 

The more people that visit the museum and enjoy it, means there is more potential for ornery people to also visit, and that’s okay. I’d love it if I was in a financial position to fund a 100,000 square foot building full of automotive and historical artifacts and allow visitors from all over the world to view everything completely for free.

The reality is, I can’t and neither can most other automotive museums. In fact, revenue generated from admission is almost never enough to cover the operating expenses of a museum. 

Most museums have to have another source of revenue. From a benefactor would be nice. Sales, storage, events, donations are all the common alternative sources. I created Vintage Garage Antiques, which acts as a giant gift shop for the museum, but without it there would be no Miles Through Time Automotive Museum.

My goal, and I believe most other nonprofit automotive museums’ goals, are to keep admission as low as possible, but at the same time, keep the museum open. There is no point in keeping admission so low that the museum cannot operate. 

All the museums this week had to have their admissions updated. Between hours, admission and just ensuring automotive museums are still open, that is why I send this email every week.

The RV Hall of Fame Museum was the first museum that was actually brought to my attention by a user. I had not updated the museum for almost three years and in that time the museum had to increase their admission. 

I have not been to this museum in person, but it looks amazing. I don’t think you need to be a fan of camping or RVing to be impressed and learn something.

The Cole Land Transportation Museum was another museum where three years had passed by, and in that time admission was increased $2. This museum was founded by Galen Cole, who passed away in 2020, and six years later the museum is still operating and being enjoyed by visitors from all over.

The Shelby American Collection also increased their admission over the last two years since I visited. At the time, admission was only $5, which was about as low as admission ever gets before just being free. 

Today, admission is $10, still low on the overall spectrum of museum admission rates, but this museum also doubled in size to help justify the increase. If you’re a Shelby fan, this place will be your heaven.

If you ever see anything that needs to be updated in the guide, let me know. Some of the museums are good about sending me updates, but others I’ve never had any contact with, and may not know of updates until I audit them with this email.

Keeping everything as up to date as possible is important, but ultimately, the Automotive Museum Guide is just the gateway to finding the museums to visit. It is always recommended to learn more and verify hours, admission, location and if they are still open by verifying with the museums directly.

If you want to see more, visit the Weekly 3.

Plan your next trip, discover your new favorite, or find the nearest museum

 Sean Mathis
Creator of Automotive Museum Guide
Founder of Miles Through Time Automotive Museum

P.S. Make sure you follow AMG on Facebook and join the FB Group to see what’s going on at all the museums.

A few years ago, I did my first sweepstakes for Miles Through Time Automotive Museum. I always thought it would be cool to be able to give away something substantial and create a special, exciting moment for someone.

Of course, like most things I’ve done, I had no idea what I was doing. At the time, no vehicles had been donated that we could give away, and I definitely didn’t have the ability to purchase a car to give away.

Then I came across some really cool-looking board track racer replica motorcycles on eBay. I thought these things were so cool that I wanted one in the museum as well, so I bought two of them.

I probably shouldn’t have purchased two, but my idea was to raise enough funds that it would cover the cost of both bikes, and we’d get to keep one. I promoted the sweepstakes as giving the winner the option to choose which board track racer they wanted. The black one or the red one, and you can see them HERE.

To my surprise, we did not raise enough funds to cover the cost of both bikes. That would have been a major issue, but amazingly, the winner donated the 1920 Indian board track replica back to the museum. 

That act of generosity saved me big time. In an attempt to salvage my sweepstakes, I did a second round and gave away the other bike. In the end, we did raise enough to cover the costs of the replica motorcycles and kept one in the end, but I got very lucky.

Technically, the third sweepstakes I did ended last year. This time, the prize, a Jeep Wrangler, was donated to the museum, which was a way better option. Of course, the unexpected curveball was that the winner chose the cash option. 

This wasn’t a huge deal because we did raise enough to cover the cash option, but giving away money defeated the point of the sweepstakes. In the end, the Jeep was auctioned off on Cars & Bids, where it sold for enough to cover the amount given away and then a few thousand more.

Miles Through Time Automotive Museum didn’t raise anywhere near enough to be able to construct the new building the museum requires. In the end, we raised just over $40k before all the deductions from credit card processing and software charges. 

This amount is nothing compared to the six and seven digits I see getting raised for some vehicles at other museums, but the amount we did raise had a huge impact on ensuring the museum has some funding. 

When admissions is your main source of revenue, and the only other random source comes from donations, revenue generated from sweepstakes is a huge help, which is why so many museums do them.

The San Diego Automotive Museum has had some recent renovations done, and the most recent exhibit is Formula 1 Stories. I was able to visit the museum on my way back from driving the donated e21 BMW. I didn’t even get stranded there as I did at Petersen on the same trip. If you want to help support the museum, they are giving away a 2026 Ford Bronco.

The Rolls-Royce Foundation Museum is one I have not had an opportunity to visit in person, but I’m a fan of Rolls-Royce and would love to have a big, luxurious British car on display at Miles Through Time someday.

Interestingly enough, the museum is doing a sweepstake, but they aren’t giving away a Rolls-Royce. Instead, they are giving away a 1992 Bentley Turbo R, which is also a cool car.

The California Automobile Museum is also doing a sweepstake, and they are giving away a red 1965 Porsche 356C. Miles Through Time Automotive Museum used to have a car that looked just like it, temporarily on display. You can’t go wrong with a 356.

Use the promo code AMG30EXTRA for 30% more entries on any of these sweepstakes, and there are more under the EXTRAS tab on the website. You can click SWEEPSTAKES. This is just another way you can help support museums and perhaps have a chance to win a new car.

If you want to see more, visit the Weekly 3.

Plan your next trip, discover your new favorite, or find the nearest museum

 Sean Mathis
Creator of Automotive Museum Guide
Founder of Miles Through Time Automotive Museum

P.S. Make sure you follow AMG on Facebook and join the FB Group to see what’s going on at all the museums.

If you read nothing beyond this first paragraph, do just this one thing. Scroll all the way to the bottom of this email, where you should see three sections. Each section will say the state, the name of the museum in that state and a button to read more.

This email started as just that bottom section, listing three automotive museums throughout North America. Every week I use this email as a tool to ensure the three automotive museums I list are as accurate as possible.

The goal has always been to just introduce the museums to you, so you, as a potential visitor, can learn more about them. Sometimes they’ll be convenient to visit, and sometimes they won’t, but we live in a digital world and there is still a lot that can be learned from a museum 3,000 miles away.

I started writing a little something each week, just the make these emails a little more interesting. I have a pretty unique perspective when it comes to museums. I didn’t go to school to work at a museum. I didn’t have any museum experience. I don’t have a collection of cars, and I’m not independently wealthy.

And yet, I created Miles Through Time Automotive Museum with one car I inherited and nine years later, the museum averages about 130 full-size cars on display. I created automotivemuseumguide.com from the research I did trying to figure out what I was supposed to do.

True automotive enthusiasts are going to crave wanting to know where they can experience more. I created the Automotive Museum Guide to make it easy to find all the automotive museums you could actually visit.

Every couple of weeks, someone emails me and says they really wished I had told them exactly where each museum is that I mention. Typically, I purposefully do not mention where the museums are in this portion of the email.

For example, Mendenhall’s Museum of Gasoline Pumps & Petroliana is a super cool private collection that is accessible to the public by appointment. This is one of those museums that teeters between private collection and museum. 

Technically, it is the private collection of Mark Mendenhall, but since his son Mark and daughter-in-law Vickie still make it accessible to the public, it is a museum.

The Collection on Palmetto is another fantastic collection that I’ve had the privilege to see in person. If you’re a fan of steam cars, they have some beautiful ones. The entire location is actually quite beautiful. This museum does have regular hours, but they are limited.

The D.W. Correll Museum was also a private collection, but Mr. Correll loved his city so much he left his entire collection and two buildings to the city. Mr. Correll collected many things beyond just cars, like over 5,000 rocks and visitors can still enjoy them all today.

Hopefully, I’ve piqued your interest enough about each of these museums that you’d like to know a little bit more about them. All you have to do is click the hyperlinked name of the museum, and it will tell you more about the museum, including the exact location and contact information.

Inevitably, every few weeks someone emails and tells me how much they wished I would tell them exactly where the museums are that I mention. Sometimes, depending on the email provider, they can do some funky things, and I thought perhaps the bottom section, which says specifically which state the museums are located, was being hidden somehow.

I’ve been able to confirm with multiple people, who understand they can see what states the museums are located in or just click the hyperlinks to really learn more about the museums.

Somehow, some people still get upset with me for not specifically saying more about where the museums are located, to the point where they email me to tell me they want to unsubscribe because I won’t tell them more.

Please understand, I don’t want people to automatically disregard a museum because it is deemed too far away. The goal is to learn about each museum, even if it is a museum you may never visit. 

Miles Through Time Automotive Museum is in Georgia, and yet there are people who actively support the museum as far away as California. Either by donating to the museum or just helping spread the word, so more people can discover it.

In some cases, some of the museum’s long-distance supporters may never be able to visit the museum in person, but they still get to be a part of the museum and see what we do by following on social media and museum emails. Anyone can do the same thing for any museum in the world.

Visit the museums you can, and support the museums you connect with.

If you want to see more, visit the Weekly 3.

Plan your next trip, discover your new favorite, or find the nearest museum

 Sean Mathis
Creator of Automotive Museum Guide
Founder of Miles Through Time Automotive Museum

P.S. Make sure you follow AMG on Facebook and join the FB Group to see what’s going on at all the museums.

It has been a rough start to 2026 for automotive museum founders. On February 19th, Jon Oscher passed away. I had the privilege of meeting Jon, and he was the founding benefactor of not only the great Savoy Automobile Museum, but also Tellus Science Museum, Bartow History Museum and Booth Western Art Museum. Jon got to live to 93 years old, but the legacy he left behind will last for centuries.

Just three days earlier, on February 16th, the great George Barber passed away at the age of 85. George was well known for many things including the Barber Vintage Motorsports Museum. This museum also holds the record for being the largest motorcycle collection in the world.

I never got to meet George, but I’ve been to his museum multiple times. I can tell you with certainty, the Barber Museum is one of the greatest automotive museums in the world.

Unfortunately, museum founders passing away is inevitable. What happens next can sometimes be very disappointing. Click HERE to see how many automotive museums I’ve had to mark closed just in the last 6 years.

Fortunately, Barber and Savoy aren’t going anywhere, but in 2021 Larry Klairmont passed away and by 2025 the Klairmont Kollections Museum was permanently closed.

James “Bozo” Cordova, who was the founder of Route 66 Auto Museum passed away in 2025 and the museum is still open for now. I did visit this museum during one of my cross-country trips, and it was a cool stop, but I will be surprised if it lasts long-term. So I recommend visiting sooner rather than later.

In 2023, Peter Mullin, the founder of Mullin Automotive Museum passed away. In 2024, the museum was closed. This was an amazing museum, I unfortunately never got to visit in person.

In 2022, Dr Fred Simone passed away, but luckily, the Simone Foundation Automotive Museum lives on. This museum is still on my list of museums to visit. Fortunately, Dr. Simone ensured we’d all have the opportunity.

As the founder of Miles Through Time Automotive Museum, this is something I think about constantly. Granted, I’m at least half the age of all these other great founders, but I also don’t have the resources they all did to create their wonderful museums. 

I wouldn’t want to do any of this if I thought there was an expiration date. My goal is to ensure when I am gone, hopefully many decades from now, that Miles Through Time Automotive Museum will still be a place where automotive history and stories can be preserved and shared with visitors from all over the world.

If you want to see more, visit the Weekly 3.

Plan your next trip, discover your new favorite, or find the nearest museum

 Sean Mathis
Creator of Automotive Museum Guide
Founder of Miles Through Time Automotive Museum

P.S. Make sure you follow AMG on Facebook and join the FB Group to see what’s going on at all the museums.

This week, I’ve got three automotive museums to share with you that are all incredibly different from each other. So much so that it would be impossible to fairly compare them with each other. Which means you’d need to evaluate them individually, yourself.

I’ve been to a lot of automotive museums in the USA, but I have not visited anywhere near the majority of them. I would say I have personally only visited about a quarter of the museums in the USA. 

It is literally impossible for me to rank any of them. There are museums that impressed me more than others. There are museums that had vehicles on display that I was more interested in than others, and there are museums where the human element made my visit more enjoyable than others.

My personal experience, based on my particular interest and interaction with museum personnel, is unique to me. My intention is not to tell you which museums are more worth your time. My goal is to introduce you to as many automotive museums as possible so you can experience them yourself. 

Kernersville Auto Museum is a relatively new museum. Jim Taylor, the founder, built the 11,000 square foot building, specifically to create the museum which is free to visit. I even had a hand in building the museum’s website and connected it to the Automotive Museum Guide from day one, which has helped visitors find the museum.

The Beller Museum is another museum you can visit for free (with an appointment) although donations are welcome. This museum was created in 1993 by Jordon and Corinne Beller. The museum’s focus is to showcase products of Detroit’s heyday. You’ll see vehicles and equipment from the ’20s to the ’60s. 

The Audrain Automobile Museum is high on my list of museums I’d like to visit. This museum was founded in 2014 and has a collection of over 400 vehicles it can share in the museum. One of their big exhibits right now is Super to Hypercars: Then & Now.

My intention is not to tell you everything possible about each museum. I want you to be intrigued enough to click on the link to learn more about each museum. You can click the hyperlinked name of the museum, or scroll right to the bottom where each museum is listed underneath the state where the museum resides.

When you visit the museum’s page on the Automotive Museum Guide, you’ll learn a little bit more about the museum, including where it is, contact information and how much it costs to visit. It’s still always a good idea to then go directly to the museum’s website, where, hopefully, you can learn even more about the museum.

No museums pay me for any of this. My hope is that while more people are able to discover and visit automotive museums all over the world, they are also introduced to the museum I founded, Miles Through Time Automotive Museum. 

If you’re interested in visiting one automotive museum, the odds are you’d want to visit others. You just need to know about them, and that’s where the Automotive Museum Guide comes in very useful.

I know Google Ads are annoying, and I wish I could justify removing them entirely, but without actual sponsors, Google Ads at least cover the cost to host the website for everyone to use. I did recently remove the pop-up ads, to make the website more user-friendly. I hope it helps. 

If you want to see more, visit the Weekly 3.

Plan your next trip, discover your new favorite, or find the nearest museum

 Sean Mathis
Creator of Automotive Museum Guide
Founder of Miles Through Time Automotive Museum

P.S. Make sure you follow AMG on Facebook and join the FB Group to see what’s going on at all the museums.

In early 2020, I was trying to reopen Miles Through Time Automotive museum. I had shut down the museum in the original location in October 2019 and basically started over from scratch in an unused portion of a flea market in an old textile mill.

Despite all the setbacks, the museum still officially reopened by May. Even though the world was not in the best place, it was my first taste of museum freedom. For the previous three years, if the museum was open, it was because I was there. I did everything by myself and it was exhausting.

At the new location, the museum was tucked inside a flea market, and the flea market staff sold tickets to visit the museum. My only expense was given a portion of the admission to the owner of the flea market. In my mind, this was an awesome arrangement.

I would learn a lot over the next 15 months, that would change my mind about how awesome the arrangement was. However, before I would question what I had gotten myself into, I did it to myself again in another way.

I live one hour away from Miles Through Time Automotive Museum. The commute isn’t bad, but it racks the miles up quickly and fuel expenses definitely have to be accounted for.

I know I’ll get some hate mail, but, I have always wanted a Tesla Model S. For a four-door sedan, it is a good-looking car and it’s fast. The bonus is the electric aspect, but honestly, if it looked the exact same and was just as fast with an internal combustion engine, it would still do it for me.

I came up with a proposal and presented it to my wife, to explain how buying a used Model S would be a smart decision for me to commute back and forth from the museum.

My presentation was solid, and my wife gave the green light. Of course, I had already found the potential car when I gave my presentation, so the next steps came quickly, and before long I was the owner of a 2014 Tesla Model S P85.

Teslas were a lot less common back then, and I thought the car was pretty special, so I started to see what unique things I could do, and I went down the rabbit hole of Guinness World Records.

I learned the was a record held by China for the Longest Tesla Parade.  The number to beat was 145 Teslas. In my mind, I was like, “there is way more than that around where I live, I could break that record.”

Next thing you know, I’m in way over my head organizing a parade of Teslas in December 2020. An amazing thing happened though. I met a bunch of great people. The record was annihilated with 340 Tesla, and we raised over $10,000 for Operation Underground Railroad. You can see the Tesla Record HERE.

I didn’t know what I was getting myself into with the Tesla record, just like I didn’t know what I was getting myself into with Miles Through Time or even this Automotive Museum Guide, but with enough passion and effort, things have a way of happening.

The Jeep Guy Museum is a family’s passion for Jeeps. The museum has over 80 Jeeps on display dating back to 1941. The museum is a tribute to Jeep and you can see they are truly passionate. Rumor has it, the museum is growing.

Greg Miller is another passionate guy. He has a passion for Land Cruisers, so much so that when he found out that Toyota does not celebrate his favorite vehicle well enough, Greg took it upon himself to create the Land Cruiser Heritage Museum.

The goal is to have every model of the Land Cruiser represented in the museum. That number is over 100, and the museum is well on their way to making it happen.

The Museum of Off-Road Adventure, or The MORA was founded in 2018 by a group of passionate off-road enthusiasts. The group that founded the museum saw that there was nothing quite like what they wanted to create to share their off-road vehicle passion, so they made it happen themselves. The museum is open on the 1st and 3rd Saturdays of the month.

I do still own the Tesla, and now it has about 140k miles on it. However, my wife has commandeered the car, so I very rarely ever drive it up to the museum now.

The odds are you have some sort of automotive passion running through your veins. You do not need to start a museum, but visiting an automotive museum will help feed your passion.

If you have the time, I also highly recommend volunteering at your local museum. The volunteer docents are what can take visitors from looking at a decent collection of vehicles and turn it into an unforgettable museum experience. Anyone can help make that kind of impact, and your passion will be shared with people from all over the world.

If you want to see more, visit the Weekly 3.

Plan your next trip, discover your new favorite, or find the nearest museum

 Sean Mathis
Creator of Automotive Museum Guide
Founder of Miles Through Time Automotive Museum

P.S. Make sure you follow AMG on Facebook and join the FB Group to see what’s going on at all the museums.