The California Automobile Museum is planning a three-stage renovation that would give it a new main entrance, a gift shop and cafe, and about 5,000 to 6,000 square feet of new exhibit space. Executive Director Karen McClaflin confirmed to What Now Sacramento that the project is expected to start in the spring and finish by fall to winter 2027.
The museum, at 2200 Front St., is not planning to shut down. “We are hoping not to close it,” McClaflin said. “We have broken up the project into three stages so that we’re just working on one stage at a time.” Parts of the building may close while they’re being worked on. “We may close certain portions of the museum while it’s being worked on, but we don’t plan to close the whole thing.”
The first stage turns the storage shed at the front of the building into the museum’s new main entryway, gift shop and cafe. The museum isn’t adding any square footage. “We’re just converting, transforming the areas that we have into more efficient space,” McClaflin said. She said the new entrance will be much more visible from the street, and even from the freeways, and plans to put a couple of cars out front so it looks “much more inviting and more like a car museum.”
In the second stage, once the new front desk and entryway are finished, the museum will move everything there and start renovating the old entryway, front desk and gift shop area into a new event rental space. In the third stage, the museum will move its events into that space, and the area where events are held now will become exhibit space. “We’ll be gaining about, I would say, 5 to 6,000 square feet in exhibit space,” McClaflin said.
The museum has been a Sacramento fixture for decades. It started as the California Vehicle Foundation in 1983 and opened to the public on May 1, 1987, as the Towe Ford Museum, later the Towe Auto Museum, before taking its current name. It occupies a 72,000-square-foot, warehouse-style building and displays more than 150 vehicles, including a 1997 General Motors EV1, one of about 40 surviving, a replica 1963 Shelby Cobra from the film Ford v Ferrari and a 1978 Kawasaki CHP motorcycle from the TV series CHiPs. It also offers Sunday Drives, rides in a museum car, on the third Sunday of each month.
The renovation is being paid for through a capital campaign, and the museum still needs donations. “We have been doing a capital campaign raising funds for this. We’ve raised about $1.8 million, and we need to get to $2.5 million. So we’re still doing fundraising. If anyone’s interested in supporting the project, we are open to that,” McClaflin told What Now Sacramento.
