A first look inside the remodeled Honda Collection Hall at Twin Ring Motegi

If you’re a Hot Wheels collector, sometimes you just have to pull everything out of storage and go through it. Honda has been doing a similar thing, except with its entire car collection. It recently opened a new Racing Gallery at Suzuka Circuit, an American Honda Collection Hall, and it remodeled its flagship museum, the original Honda Collection Hall at Twin Ring Motegi. In a new video, Honda offers a peek inside the facility, and its much more museum-like atmosphere.

The old Honda Collection Hall was no slouch. We considered it the best heritage collection display among all the Japanese carmakers. Nissan had more cars, but it was essentially just a warehouse. Toyota has a bigger museum, but it showed all makes and models, not just Toyotas. However, the cars were usually parked in a pretty cramped gallery at floor, with just one small placard each

The new Collection Hall looks like a real museum. They’ve now build stands to park the cars on, which arranges them in a more dignified display (and you don’t have to bend down so far to examine them). The lighting is much better, using spotlights to direct attention to each display, rather than blasting the whole room with fluorescent lighting.

Cars are arranged in groups that tell a story, with information on display walls behind them. Before, they sometimes had a lawnmower next to a car. While it looks like all this translated to fewer cars and motorcycles on the museum floor, the over all atmosphere is more befitting of works of art. Some of the cars have been transferred to Suzuka, and Honda keeps a large storage facility that is not open to the public, so we have no reason to believe that any of the cars ended up like these two from the Toyota USA Museum.