Museum Pieces, The Revs Institute for Automotive Research

Research Center strives to deepen understanding and appreciation of automotive history

The Revs Institute for Automotive Research, Inc. in Naples, Florida presents the Collier Collection of over 100 significant automobiles built between 1896-1995. The automobiles on display at Revs are some of the rarest and most important cars ever built. They are the vehicles that blazed technical pathways, redefined aesthetic standards, made history and changed the world. These pieces of  automotive history are operational and continue to demonstrate their engineering prowess on race tracks and roadways the world over.

The Institute primarily serves as a haven for scholars, preservationists and passionate connoisseurs of automotive history. In keeping with Miles Collier’s vision to embolden the legacy of the transformative impact the automobile had on 20th century society, The Revs Institute is one of the leading repositories of historical automotive documents, photographs and ephemera and is dedicated to deepening our understanding and appreciation of automotive history. They also embrace technological advancements to deliver history in exciting and compelling ways that resonate with the public.

Revs History

An accomplished fine artist, investor and philanthropist, Miles Collier also spent the better part of a decade racing in an E-Production Porsche Speedster, as well as other vintage automobiles. In 1984,  Miles Collier became the inaugural recipient of the SVRA Driver of the Year Award. His father and uncle, Miles and Sam, respectively, are credited with introducing sports car racing to the United States during the 1930s. Together, the pair were early members of the Sports Car Club of America fostering  Miles Collier’s passion for auto racing.  

In 1986, Miles Collier acquired the Cunningham Museum collection of longtime family friend Briggs Swift Cunningham, which included the first Ferrari racing car ever sold in the United States and one of six Bugatti Royales ever produced. What is now known today as the Collier Collection began to take shape as Miles Collier continued to grow his private collections of sports cars and ephemera. 

 The Rev’s Institute was founded in 2009 to serve as a center of scholarly study. That academic mission was bolstered in 2011 by the acquisition of the Ludvigsen Library; Karl Ludvigsen, a former General Motors consultant and past editor of Car and Driver and Motor Trend magazines, had assembled a vast library with over 7,000 automotive books, 300,000 photographs and hundreds of research files.

That same year, the Institute began an affiliation with Stanford University known as The Revs Program that fosters a wide ranging academic focus on the automobile. In recognition of the program’s scholastic merits, Hearst Publishing Corporation transferred its entire archive of Road & Track magazine to The Revs Program which will preserve and digitize the collection and make the information available to the public.

The Revs Institute also endeavors to showcase the status of the automobile as a cultural icon, an agent of change and human progress by, collecting and documenting history and making it available to a new era of scholars and thought leaders, The Revs Institute will serve as a platform for the next century of automotive innovation both on and off the track.

Revs at Stanford

The Revs Program at Stanford established a new transdisciplinary field connecting the past, present and future of the automobile. The program fosters an intellectual community, bridging the humanities and fine arts, social sciences, design, science and engineering, and the professions. The automobile is at the core of understanding both the 20th and 21st century.

Research Library

The Revs Institute research library was established to advance the scholarly study of the automobile. Here, a scholar has access to hundreds of thousands of books, journals and documents that underscore the importance of the history of transportation, technology and business. The library and archives of The Revs Institute contain over one million discrete items including over 700,000 photographs, 24,000 books, over 200,000 magazines and journals, papers, other written documents, films, and ephemera.