Rare Metals: the California Automobile Museum

Nestled on a quiet corner in Sacramento lies California’s cutest auto museum.

Transcript

00:00 We continue to show cars that represent our evolving cultures and our evolving

00:07 nostalgia.

00:09 The California Automobile Museum is known as a museum of stories. We

00:16 represent the cars that you would have driven, your parents would have driven,

00:21 your grandparents would have driven. We don't have the real high-end Tiffany of

00:26 cars. This Starstreak motorhome was built in 1978 by a man named Paul Jones

00:36 who used to work as an aerospace engineer. He used an Oldsmobile chassis to create

00:41 this amazing motorhome. A lot of people think it was actually built from a

00:45 Cadillac because of the styling, but it isn't. It also has a shower and toilet

00:49 inside of it.

00:52 My name is Steve Dippert. I live in San Jose, California, and it's a 1964 deluxe

01:04 Falcon station wagon. My parents loved Fords and so they had a Falcon. In 1969, my

01:12 parents decided to take a road trip, rather an extended one. It was for five

01:15 weeks. I started seeing station wagons and I thought that might be kind of cool

01:21 to have a station wagon. They went to the exchange and bought some brand new

01:25 luggage, as you see behind me, the Samsonite, and those are actually some of

01:29 my mother's things in the suitcase and that's my chatty Kathy. Everything has

01:34 been updated. So I now have a 1989 Mustang 5.0 engine in it, a five-speed

01:40 transmission in it, so I can cruise down the highway very comfortably. I wouldn't

01:46 trade the memories for anything. It was a really a great time.

01:51 1977 AMC Pacer is probably one of the cars that people either love or hate the

02:00 most here in the museum. It's such an iconic car and maybe a time that some

02:04 people want to forget, but we believe it's worth remembering. The Pacer is a

02:08 car that came out right after the gas crisis of 1973. The Detroit is trying to

02:13 find different ways to have smaller cars but still big enough for American

02:16 families, so they come out with a Pacer. It has a really unique styling, which was

02:21 not as successful, but still had pretty good sales. Not this car because it's the

02:26 most beautiful car in the world, but this car because this represents what was

02:30 going on in California. We tell the stories of the automobile and how it

02:35 affects our life and your life and our children's life and their children's

02:41 lives.

02:43 (upbeat music)