Blog

General Motors Heritage Center in Warren, Michigan has 180 historic GM vehicles on display at any one time. From a collection of around 800 vehicles stored in four large warehouses in Warren, GM rotates cars and trucks from yesterday in and out of the Heritage Center. In fact General Motors actively manages its collection buying, selling and trading several cars a week.

First walking into the Heritage Center is a stunning experience. Wall-to-wall cars and trucks all in excellent condition. Some have been completely restored. Some still have vacation stickers in the rear quarter windows. A few have window stickers.

180 vehicles under the roof… the only problem is that they each can’t get enough display space. I’d like to see the 1957 Chevrolet Nomad from every angle. I’d like to see the 1959 Buick Electra in all of its “beauty”. Unfortunately, there is barely enough space between the cars to walk between them.

There are separate areas for Chevrolets, Buicks, Oldsmobiles, Pontiacs, Cadilacs, trucks. A display of hood ornaments shows how ornamental cars of the fifties and sixties were. With today’s pedestrian safety standards, hood ornaments probably will never return – they probably shouldn’t because we worked hard to get rid of them. But some are beauties.

Hats off to General Motors for preserving its heritage in such a spectacular way. You might wonder how a company in financial difficulty can afford to maintain something like this? Heritage is important and GM has tons of it. That is reinforced by its Heritage Center.