Tampa Bay Automobile Museum, Automobile museum in Pinellas Park, United States.
The Tampa Bay Automobile Museum is an automobile museum in Pinellas Park, Florida, displaying historic cars from the 1920s and 1930s, including vehicles with front-wheel drive and rear-engine layouts. The cars are arranged in a single gallery floor and are kept in running condition rather than stored as static exhibits.
The museum opened in 2005 and from the start included a working reproduction of the French Fardier de Cugnot, built in 1770 and widely regarded as the first self-propelled vehicle ever made. That single object sets the starting point for the story the rest of the collection tells.
The collection brings together cars from France, Czechoslovakia, Germany, England, Northern Ireland, and the United States, showing how early car makers in different countries took very different paths. Visitors can see these approaches side by side, which makes the differences in design choices easy to notice.
The museum is in Pinellas Park, which is easiest to reach by car. Allow enough time to look closely at each vehicle, since many of the technical details reward a slow and careful visit.
The reproduction of the Fardier de Cugnot is not just on display but actually runs, and it is occasionally driven through the exhibition space. This makes the museum one of very few places in the world where a vehicle from the 18th century can be seen in motion.
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