Route 66 Electric Vehicle Museum

“Study the past if you would divine the future.” These words of Confucius clearly resonate with Roderick Wilde, the owner of the world’s largest collection of antique electric vehicles. Dreaming of creating a museum devoted entirely to EVs, Wilde first displayed part of his collection at the 2014 Route 66 International Festival in Kingman, Arizona. The exhibit was so successful that it became a permanent museum inside Kingman’s historic Powerhouse.

Electric vehicles aren’t a 21st-century innovation, they date back to the 19th century. For a brief time in the early 1900s, they even competed with gasoline cars, before cheap fuel and limited battery technology rendered them impractical. For much of the 20th century, electric power was relegated to small vehicles like golf carts, mobility scooters, and “neighborhood electric vehicles.”

The museum’s collection includes those everyday models alongside celebrity-owned golf carts (including ones belonging to Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson), a 2008 Tesla Roadster, and a record-breaking electric race car.

Though the Powerhouse space currently displays only part of Wilde’s collection, the museum plans to expand into a larger downtown location in the future.

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