The Petersen Automotive Museum sits on the corner of Wilshire Boulevard and South Fairfax Avenue like a great, alien ark; its surface is liquid and irregular, like sunlight glinting on the deep metallic flake of some ruby-hued customized hot rod. Los Angeles is a city where the car is king, and this building houses the spirit of automotive enthusiasm in all its glittering facets. It is a museum of rolling artwork, a treasure trove of famous and infamous objects, a gathering place for all those who love the automobile.
The building was once a department store, huge and impersonal and devoid of windows. This lack of natural light made the place ideal as an crypt for keeping paint and rubber safe from fading and cracking in the pitiless California sunshine. However, the somewhat stodgy original building is now a far more modern space, filled with rotating exhibits of the strange and wonderful.
The newest display is based around the art of Bugatti. Creator of some of the most delicate and valuable machines of the early 20th century, the namesake of Frenchman Ettore Bugatti survives in the form of the Chiron, a massively powerful (1,500 horsepower), massively expensive ($2.6-million U.S.) coupe.
Combining luxury and physics-defying speed, the Chiron is possibly the ultimate supercar. The Petersen has one in its lobby.
That’s not all: The first thing you see as you walk through the museum’s tall glass doors is a swooping 1939 Bugatti Type 57C. Clad in classic red and black, the Chiron’s grandsire is approximately six times more valuable, and has an elegance that no modern car can match. Next to it, curators have set up an exploded version showing the great skill in metalwork that went into creating such a machine.
Related: More photos from the Petersen Automotive Museum
The main Bugatti exhibit is a place of superlatives. The Bugatti family were renowned artists long before the age of the motorcar arrived, sculpting flowing animals in bronze and rule-breaking art-nouveau furniture. The cars that carried the family bloodline combined this skill and passion with lessons learned in aeronautical engineering.
Creating an exhibit that manages to tell the story of Bugatti is more than just picking a few of the shiniest examples. The Petersen’s layout provides contrast and comparison by showing some of Rembrandt Bugatti’s sculptures, works in displays of Carlo Bugatti’s furniture, and then accentuates the layout by hand-selecting a few of the most important machines from the marque. At the centre of the space, the massive Royale has a literally huge presence, while the rare Type 57SC is astoundingly beautiful.
However, the Petersen isn’t only about the beautiful and the rare. Walk up the spiral staircase and the first thing you bump into is the grinning face of a full-scale Lightning McQueen, hero of Pixar’s Cars. Automotive enthusiasm takes many forms, and the museum’s second floor celebrates the newest gearheads. There’s even a design studio where the curious can watch new automotive shapes come to life at the hands of college-age designers-in-training.
After touring a space filled with all-silver sportscars, a visit upstairs reveals more whimsy. Movie-star cars are always a favourite for visitors, and the Petersen has some of the best, from the Magnum P.I. Ferrari 308 through to the Batmobile from the Tim Burton movie. There are also star cars of a different sort, including a yellow Pantera that once belonged to Elvis.
Along with the fun stuff, the Petersen offers an educational side, showing off alternative-fuel vehicles and other automotive innovations. If you’ve ever wanted to see a Tesla with its skin off, there’s one here, as well as early hydrogen and fuel-cell machines that showcase how far we’ve come.
But even with all the floor space, the Petersen’s collection is far too big to see at once. Cars are rotated through regularly, but a large part of the collection is stashed deep underground in the basement. They call this place the Vault and it’s also home to the Petersen’s archives and administrative offices.
Buy a second ticket, and you can gain access to the Vault via an elevator. You can’t go down by yourself: Usually, a docent will guide a tour group, going over what makes each car so special.
Even though the cars are seemingly parked cheek-by-jowl down here, anywhere there’s room, there’s perhaps even a greater sense of wonder in the Petersen’s basement than in its carefully-coordinated displays. Upstairs, things are arranged to tell a story; down here, it’s more like sneaking around after hours in an automotive version of the vast warehouse at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark.
There’s something new to discover around every corner. Here is a Mercedes-Benz limousine, former owner Saddam Hussein. There’s a Ferrari gifted to Henry Ford II by Enzo Ferrari, just before they fell out and their two companies went to war. Here’s a gold-plated DeLorean, there’s a one-of-50 Tucker Torpedo.
As we catch up with a tour group poring over the massive art-deco shape of a coachbuilt Rolls-Royce, we come across one of the museum’s more recent acquisitions. It’s the 1958 Plymouth Fury that’s the villain of the movie Christine. The car’s paint gleams with menace, its windshield too dark to see what’s hidden inside.
Outside the vault, the streets are filled with traffic. There are trucks and vans and Ubers and taxis and passenger cars, all the usual everyday hum of a busy city. But for those to whom the car is something more special than just an appliance to get around, the Petersen stands like a beacon. Whatever your preferred flavour of automotive enthusiasm, from hot-rodder to art enthusiast, it’s a must-visit.