“How Can It Be a Car Museum and Not Have Ferraris and Lamborghinis?” Overheard from a disappointed ten-year – or so – boy while walking out of the Petersen Automotive Museum.

One of the things I wanted to do when Michele took me to LA was go to the Peterson Auto Museum, but now, reading about heat waves almost every place but here, writing about cars seems slightly perverted, if not immoral. But we went to the museum, it was full of cars, and we saw them. So…

The Peterson is an unusual car museum. Most car museums are built around the remains of one guy’s – or two guys’ in the case of Hans and Fritz Schlumpf’s – collection, which remains pretty static. The Peterson is closer to a standard art museum because the changing exhibitions are the biggest draw. In this case, the changing exhibits were Porche and Testla, two cars that I’m not emotionally connected to, so, like the little boy, I was a little disappointed.

Don’t get me wrong, Porche has made some unique cars over the years. They have won LeMans more than any other marque, and, when McLaren changed the CamAm game by stuffing a seven-liter Chevy V8 into the back of lightweight chassis, Porche said, “The hell with that.” and stuffed a 5.4 liter flat twelve with two turbochargers, making approximately 1200 HP, into an even lighter car that was so fast everybody else quit racing and the series folded. One nice touch was that many of these famous racing cars were parked at random – sort of – around the garage.

Porsche does have a storied history, and many of those early cars are on display.

The Tesla exhibition was entirely different; it seemed much more like a very slick, paid PR event. My complaint about Tesla is that they all seem the same, just different sizes, except the truck, which looks like a gimmick. Ultimately, the staging, the gimmick, and its electric, off-road quadricycle made the exhibition enjoyable.

The Peterson Museum has a huge garage stuffed with primarily exotic cars under the museum. They call it The Vault, and different vehicles are brought up from The Vault into the museum as mini shows. In this case, they had brought up three cars, Michele’s favorite, a 1925 Rolls-Royce Phantom I with a fabulous custom body by Jonckheere, a Belgium bus maker of all things, a 1954 Plymouth Explorer by Ghia – probably Luigi Segre, who worked for Ghia at the time – and a 1947 Cisitalia 202 Coupe by Pinin Farina. All are ultra rare, exciting cars, but, for me, the 1947 Cisitalia is the pick for the litter.

According to Paul Galloway, the Design Director at MoMA, “The key that we always try to emphasize to people is that MoMA doesn’t have a car collection, we have a design collection, and in that design collection, there are some cars.” MoMA has nine cars in their design collection now, but for the first twenty years or so, they only had one car, a bright red 1947 Cisitalia 202 Coupe by Pinin Farina. The Peterson’s Cisitalia is dark red and just as striking.

Ironically, while Michele, the disappointed little boy, and I were wandering around the museum proper, The Vault below had a small show of Maranello Masterpieces, a short-term display featuring 10 of the most iconic and bespoke Ferraris to ever leave the factory. The little boy would have been thrilled if he had only known.