Things are going to get “totally awesome” at the Petersen Automotive Museum when the venue goes back in time to celebrate the radical era of vehicles from the ‘80s and ‘90s.
“We’ve never really done anything like this before. It’s an exhibit about an era, the last two decades of the 20th century and those two decades were totally awesome for cars,” said Jonathan Eisen, curator of the new exhibition dubbed “Totally Awesome! Cars and Culture of the ’80s and ’90s”
Made up of dozens of concept cars, production models and famous vehicles from pop culture, plus a few nostalgic video games and even a fashion show, the exhibition opens to the public on Saturday, June 7 and runs through April 2026.
The cars on display exemplify the pivotal period of automotive innovation when vehicles transitioned from being pretty barebones as far as technology was concerned to higher tech machines with computer-aided designs and significant gains in power, safety, and efficiency.
“And the cars were really cool,” Eisen said. “At the beginning of the ’80s cars were still designed like they were in the ’60s and ’70s and then as the decade moved on they became more and more futuristic,” he added.
A new exhibition looking at cars from the 80s and 90s opens June 7 and runs through April 2026 at the at the Petersen Automotive Museum. (Photo courtesy at the Petersen Automotive Museum)Some of these milestone cars include a 1995 McLaren F1, the 1985 Lamborghini Countach 5000S and a 1987 Buick GNX, the first GNX ever built. The car is a super high performance Buick Regal.
“So it looks a lot like a mid-’80s Buick Regal, a very normal car that a lot of grandparents rode. But Buick gave them a high performance turbo charged engines,” Eisen said.
But of course since this exhibition deals with a time period that continues to have an impact on pop culture, there will be purely fun elements as well. So people can expect to see iconic cars like the 1981 DeLorean DMC-12 “Time Machine” used in “Back to the Future,” plus the 1998 Volkswagen Beetle featured in “Austin Powers,” and a 1984 “Pac-Man Rod,” which is a hot rod built in the early ’80s that looks just like a Pac-Man.
“it was built right in the middle of Pac Man fever. I don’t think most young people know about Pac-Man fever,” he said.
Visitors should also be ready to show off their arcade skills because there are going to be old-school video game machines where people can play car related games like Pole Position, Spy Hunter and Outrun. And in a partnership with the Los Angeles’ Fashion Institute of Design & Merchandising school, there will be mannequins throughout the exhibition dressed up in totally awesome fashion from the 80s and 90s.
‘Totally Awesome! Cars and Culture of the ’80s and ’90s’
When: Saturday, June 7-April 2026
Where: Petersen Automotive Museum, 6060 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles
Cost: Admission starts at $12 for children and $21 for adults
Information: petersen.org
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