LeMay — America’s Car Museum used the opening Wednesday of the annual Seattle Auto Show to announce three new exhibits that will open during 2015. They are American Muscle: Rivals to the End, Ford F-Series: The Truck That Grew Up with America, and a revamped Route 66 display.
The first to open, Ford F-Series, on January 10, 2015, will include 13 generations of the Ford pickup truck from 1948 to the new 2015 model.
“The F-Series is a bellwether of cultural change in the U.S.,” said Scot Keller, chief curator at the museum, which is located in Tacoma Washington. “The Truck That Grew Up with America tells the story of how the F-Series was originally designed to be a work tool and how it evolved into a family vehicle and luxury car for the working class.”
The revised Route 66 exhibition opening March 27 and running through June 30 will focus on station wagons.
“We all have a station-wagon story, whether growing up playing games with siblings in one or taking your parents’ old car on your first date,” Keller said. “The station wagon is the ultimate road-trip car, which makes it appropriate to highlight in our exhibit dedicated to the most famous highway in the U.S.”
American Muscle opens July 9 and has been designed to take museum visitors back to the 1960s and ’70s, when American Motors, Chrysler, Ford and General Motors were rivals not only in dealers’ showrooms but on the racetrack as well, “one-upping each other with more power and performance… until stricter emissions, fuel-economy standards and an oil embargo brought the muscle car competition to a halt,” as the museum’s news release puts it.
“It was a time of freedom that drivers will never have again, when gas was cheap and big engines growled,” Keller said.
“Muscle cars existed in a feel-good era before the world became truly connected, when the U.S. was still dominated by domestic automakers. American Muscle illustrates what cars were like before politics caught up with the automobile.”
The museum also announced its Vintage Motorcycle Festival for pre-1991 motorcycles will be August 22 and the Pacific Northwest Concours d’Elegance will be September 13 and will launch the museum’s 2016 Master Collectors program.
For additional details, see the museum’s website.
