As I wrote a year ago in the introduction to this TCC series on car museums, people who come to Detroit expect two things: to tour an automobile assembly plant and to visit "The" car museum.

They couldn't until recently.Ford Motor Company used to have one of the nation's most popular tourist attractions, especially since it was free, in the tour of Dearborn's famous Rouge Plant, which encompassed not only car assembly, but steel mills, a stamping plant, an engine plant, a glass plant and docks for the ore boats. Alas, Ford shut the tours down some 20 years ago in a penny-wise, pound-foolish cost-saving measure. But recently, with the site revamped for production of the new F-Series trucks, Ford has opened a new, more Disney-like tour that allows a glimpse into Rouge's vastness and newfound environmental bent.

There are more options. Today you might be able to schedule a tour at GM's Lansing Assembly Plant, but that's not Detroit, or at one of the other Southeast Michigan facilities - if you're part of a really important group. But for all practical purposes, the closest you can come to a plant tour is the Motor City exhibit at the Detroit Historical Museum, where a full-scale section of the former Cadillac Clark Avenue assembly plant is displayed, sometimes in faux operation.

Likewise, Detroit doesn't have "a" car museum - it has several devoted to special interests, some private and a few public. I wrote a few months ago about Dick Duncan's private museum behind his Ford dealership, open to the public on Thursdays. Museum Hawk reports on the Henry Ford Museum "Automobile and America" exhibit and Jack Miller's vintage Hudson museum devoted to the products of Ypsilanti will be forthcoming.

This time, the Museum Hawk is reporting on the Walter P. Chrysler Museum in Auburn Hills, Michigan, significantly the ONLY public historical car museum operated by an automobile company in this country. It's also the newest car museum - at least of any stature - and arguably the best in terms of cutting-edge museum educational props. The WPC opened in the fall of 1999.

1902 Rambler  |  

Ever wonder what "Floating Power" was? An intelligible exhibit at the Chrysler Museum explains it. How were the aerodynamics for the sensational, for the time, 1934 Airflow models developed? Another display lays it all out.

It's far more than "just" a car museum, as it portrays the history not only of Chrysler, but predecessor companies like Chalmers and Maxwell as well as the antecedents of its 1987 purchase of American Motors, the portfolio of which included Nash, Hudson, Kaiser, and Willys - notably Jeep. A place of honor on the museum's main floor is reserved for Walter P. Chrysler's tool box which he made when he was a railroad mechanic in Kansas in the 1890s.

That this museum exists at all is nothing short of miraculous. Dedicated Chrysler people had to hang on to rare cars in the first place - such as the "first" Chrysler, Plymouth, DeSoto - and also had to keep marble-eyed bean-counters from selling them off every time Chrysler had a financial reversal, which has been all too frequent since 1950. Chrysler acquired a similar collection with American Motors.