An antique vehicle museum located in the United States will be closed, and part of its collection will be auctioned for what has recently been considered an unlikely reason: the lack of professionals capable of working with carburetors.
Snook’s Dream Cars, situated in Bowling Green, Ohio, has operated for twenty-four years as a 'living museum,' requiring all exhibited automobiles, spanning models from the 1930s to the 1970s, to be self-powered. This collection represents Bill Snook's collection and is managed by his son, Jeff.
The maintenance of these vehicles depended on Terry Stetler, an experienced mechanic at the institution, who chose to retire. Jeff Snook sought a replacement but was unsuccessful, concluding that it was time to suspend the museum's activities, as a living museum with stationary cars is merely a well-decorated parking lot.
In an interview given to the Toledo Blade newspaper, Snook pointed out that the main obstacle lies in professional training: graduates from technical schools are not being taught about carburetors or classic cars, which progressively hinders the operation of these vehicles.
In the United States, the last models equipped with carburetors were discontinued in 1994, citing the Isuzu pickup and the entry-level Subaru Justy version. A model noted for its longevity was the Lada 2107, produced in Egypt until 2014.
In Brazil, the situation is analogous. Electronic fuel injection was introduced in the Volkswagen Gol GTi in 1989 and spread in the following decade, driven by Proconve emission regulations. The last Brazilian vehicle to use a carburetor was the Volkswagen Kombi, which only switched to injection in 1997.
This means that for almost three decades in the country, there has been no acquisition of a new vehicle equipped with a float, jet, and choke—a period long enough for this topic to leave technical schools and move to local workshops and collector clubs.
With the closure of the museum, fifteen cars from the collection have been made available for sale through Hagerty, a company specializing in classic vehicle insurance and auctions. This list includes pre-war examples, icons from the 1940s and 1950s, as well as European roadsters, such as the Ford Model A, Packard One Twenty, Jaguar E-Type, Alfa Romeo Giulia Spider, Volvo P1800, Ford Mustang, and Datsun 240Z.
The remaining automobiles belonging to the collection will remain off the market and can be viewed through a virtual tour offered by the museum itself. For those skilled in disassembling carburetors, a job opportunity in Ohio was mentioned.