The Best Cars of the 20th Century On Display – in South Africa!

Don’t ask me about the location – I don’t know why!  I guess South Africa is full of  car buffs.  The Franschhoek Motor Museum is located about an hour away from Cape Town, South Africa.  It contains a horde of classic cars that will make ANYBODY’s mouth start drooling!

About 100 cars out of a collection of 300 are displayed at one time.  According to the knowledgeable staff, about 200 of the cars run.  Five full-time mechanics take painstaking care of them, while restoring selected cars that don’t run.  Each of the running cars is driven at least once a month, on days when the museum is closed to the public.  The cars don’t sit there doing nothing, either!

One nice feature of the museum is that the museum offers rides in one or two cars to visitors.  It can be educational for children of all ages to be crammed next to the driver in a 1930’s Austin.  Visitors can also be chauffeured around in an early-1950’s BMW 502 Sedan, or lounge in the backseat of a Rolls-Royce Silver Shadow and a Cadillac Fleetwood (both cars are rare to South Africans).

From Formula 1 race cars to humble two-stroke DKW sedans from post-war Germany, the collection marries idiosyncrasy with a deep appreciation for the significant cars of the past century.

There is a wide variety of cars that range from the crowd-pleasing Ferrari 250 GT SWB and the McLaren F1, but also more obscure, rare cars like the 1911 Lorraine Dietric luxury tourer with a brass horn in the shape of a snake curling along its fender, or a 1910 Wolseley town car from the Edwardian period.

For truck lovers, they can stare at the 1923 Ford Model T pickup with wooden sides and the Chesterfield Cigarettes logo.

You can mooch around on the website at http://www.fmm.co.za/home/