Stuttgart homes two of the world’s most famous car museums
to visit: Porsche and Mercedes - companies with vast
histories rich in exotic cars and engineering prowess.
However, you're missing a trick if you stop at those two. Hire a car
and head an hour or so southeast, to Augsburg, and you’ll discover a
museum with even rarer and cleverer cars tucked into a more modest
building. An old tram shed, in fact. This is the Mazda Classic
Automobile Museum, and it’s fabulous.
Rather than being run by the company as a glorified showroom, it’s a
more endearing and intimate building operated by Walter Frey and his
sons. Walter’s family-run Mazda dealer has been a staple in Augsburg for
decades, and when his personal collection of classic models spilled
into uncontrollable territory, he decided it was finally time to do
something about it.
“We first had the museum idea about ten years ago,” says Walter. “We had so many cars – about 120 Mazdas – it seemed a pity if
they were just in a shed, all dirty. So we asked the Augsburg
Burgermeister if there was a place we could put a museum. He showed us
this place and we said ‘it’s in bad condition, it’s not worth doing’.
There was no roof!
“Then he said ‘you don’t know how much we’re asking for’. He told us
the price and I said to my son Markus ‘we have to buy it!’ It was very
cheap, but we weren’t actually allowed inside for a while, as it all
could have caved in.”
Humble beginnings, but it’s had a big effect. Frey’s endeavours
inadvertently convinced Toyota to build their own, far shinier museum
elsewhere in Germany. “Toyota told the guy behind it that if Mazda, who
are small, have a museum, that’s just impossible, we need one!” says
Walter. “So they arranged a museum in Cologne, bigger than this. But
inspired by it.”
Here's a look at some of the many classic cars on show:
