Tampa Bay Automobile Museum, Automobile museum in Pinellas Park, United States.
The Tampa Bay Automobile Museum is an automobile museum in Pinellas Park, Florida, housed in a 19,000-square-foot facility on the property of Polypack, Inc. Its vehicles, mostly from the 20th century, were chosen for engineering innovation: early front-wheel drive, rear-engine air-cooled Tatra designs, aerodynamic experiments, unibody construction and alternative propulsion. A full-scale, working replica of the 1770 Fardier de Cugnot, completed in 2010, is among the exhibits.
The museum was founded in March 2005 by French entrepreneur Alain Cerf, founder of the packaging machinery company Polypack, Inc., and it operates as a family-run institution on Polypack's property. The full-scale, working replica of the 1770 Fardier de Cugnot by Nicolas-Joseph Cugnot was completed in 2010, five years after the opening. In September 2019 the museum hosted a demonstration of a hydrogen fuel cell bus and a discussion of its potential use in local public transit.
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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