Four galleries trace the automobile from horseless curiosity to chrome-finned American dream. Gallery 1 displays vehicles from the 1890s and 1900s, when roads were barely more than horse trails and every car was an experiment. Gallery 2 covers the 1910s through the 1930s, the era when brands like Duesenberg, Cord, and Auburn transformed driving from novelty to necessity. Gallery 3 spans the streamlined 1930s through the postwar boom of the 1950s. Gallery 4 brings visitors into the modern age. The collection reads like a roll call of automotive history: Bugatti, Ferrari, Jaguar, Mercedes-Benz, Pierce-Arrow, Porsche, Rolls-Royce, Stutz, and the obscure K-R-I-T, a Detroit marque that vanished after 1916.

The museum holds cars that belonged to people more famous than any manufacturer. Elvis Presley's 1973 Cadillac Eldorado sits among the collection, as does Frank Sinatra's 1961 Ghia L6.4, a hand-built Italian luxury coupe. John F. Kennedy was assigned a 1962 Lincoln Continental during his presidency. John Wayne drove a 1953 Chevrolet Corvette, one of only 300 produced in the Corvette's inaugural year. Each vehicle carries the weight of its former owner's legend, transforming chrome and steel into biography.

Hollywood has borrowed from the collection repeatedly. The 1892 Philion Road Carriage appeared in Orson Welles' The Magnificent Ambersons. A 1912 Rambler 73-400 Cross-Country earned screen time in James Cameron's 1997 Titanic. The 1949 Mercury Eight that James Dean drove in Rebel Without a Cause still gleams under museum lights, its presence a reminder that some cars become as iconic as the actors who drove them. Each film appearance adds another layer to vehicles already rich with provenance.

Some cars in the collection exist nowhere else on Earth. The Phantom Corsair, a 1938 prototype that predicted the future of automotive design with its enclosed wheels and aerodynamic curves, is the only one ever built. Buckminster Fuller's Dymaxion car, a teardrop-shaped vehicle designed to eventually fly, survives here as the sole remaining prototype of three built in 1933. One of only three 24-karat gold-plated DeLoreans created for American Express sits alongside the Jerrari, William Harrah's personal creation: a Jeep Wagoneer fitted with a Ferrari V-12 engine for winter driving in the Sierra Nevada.

The man who amassed this collection opened his first Reno bingo parlor in 1937. He built a casino empire and, in his spare hours, hunted for automobiles with the same relentless determination he brought to acquiring his Virginia Street neighbors. Holiday Inn auctioned most of the collection in the mid-1980s, scattering Harrah's life's work to private buyers. The nonprofit that saved what remains opened the museum on November 5, 1989. Car Collector magazine named it among the top ten automotive museums. AutoWeek called it one of America's five greatest and placed it among the top sixteen in the world. Nevada Magazine readers consistently vote it the best museum in Northern Nevada. Harrah's casinos may have changed hands and names a dozen times, but his cars endure.