MOTAT sits on ground that has been useful to people for centuries. Tamaki Maori knew the area as Te Wai Orea - a place of clear spring water and a harvesting spot for eels. During the 1830s and 1840s, members of Ngati Tahinga, Waiohua, and Te Taou of Ngati Whatua lived here. The Auckland City Council later bought the land, built an artificial lake, and in 1877 erected the Western Springs Pumping Station, which supplied water to Auckland's reservoirs until pumping ceased entirely in 1936. The pumphouse still stands, its Victorian industrial architecture now absorbed into the museum grounds. MOTAT's two locations are connected by a heritage tramway that runs alongside Western Springs Park and past Auckland Zoo - a working transit line operated using restored trams, with track that was first laid within the museum boundaries in 1967 and progressively extended through 1981 and 2007.

MOTAT became a major champion of Richard Pearse, the Canterbury farmer widely regarded as one of the earliest aviators in history. The museum holds the remains of Pearse's first aircraft from 1903, the fuselage of his second plane, and his complete third aircraft - a vertical takeoff machine that was visionary in concept if not in execution. A replica of the first plane was built for a 1975 documentary film. The aviation collection, named in honor of Air Chief Marshal Keith Park and housed in a hall opened by aviator Jean Batten in 1977, has grown into one of New Zealand's largest, with aircraft spanning from 1930s de Havilland biplanes to a restored Avro Lancaster bomber, a Short Solent flying boat from New Zealand's first international airline TEAL, and former RNZAF Douglas A-4 Skyhawks. A replica Hawker Hurricane in the markings of Keith Park - the New Zealander who commanded the air defense of London during the Battle of Britain - stands at the entrance.

The road transport collection holds one of the Ferguson tractors that Edmund Hillary used to lay supply depots during the 1958 Commonwealth Trans-Antarctic Expedition - the same modified farm vehicles with which Hillary famously beat British explorer Vivian Fuchs's Sno-Cats to the South Pole on 4 January 1958. Nearby sits one of the first Trekka utility vehicles, New Zealand's only homegrown production car, built between 1966 and 1973 on Czechoslovak Skoda engines and chassis. The railway collection includes seven steam locomotives spanning from an 1874 NZR F class to the iconic NZR K class, and a triple-expansion engine from the Sydney ferry Greycliffe, which sank in 1927 after being struck by the Union Steam Ship Company's Royal Mail Steamship Tahiti, killing 40 people. Over 20 trams from Auckland, Wellington, Wanganui, and Dunedin's Mornington Cable system fill the collection, many of them operational. The breadth is astonishing - and intentional.

MOTAT's path has not been smooth. Patronage dropped 40 percent after the summer of 1982-83, as new competing attractions drew Aucklanders elsewhere. Permanent staff was slashed from 43 to 9. An arson attack in 2008 destroyed a vintage railway carriage. A 2012 report noted infighting between management, volunteers, and Auckland Council. But the museum kept reinventing itself. When Michael Frawley became CEO in 2013, he restructured the organization around three hubs and refocused the mission on "Kiwi ingenuity" - using the historical collection to illuminate both the past and the future of New Zealand technology. The Te Puawananga Science and Technology Centre, opened in May 2024 with three gallery spaces and three classrooms, won International Exhibition of the Year at the 2025 Museums and Heritage Awards. Within two years of its original opening in 1964, MOTAT had amassed 4,000 volunteers and received over 100,000 donated items from Aucklanders. That grassroots energy - the impulse to save, preserve, and share - remains the institution's defining characteristic.