Latest News

REVS Press Conference
The January 2012 REVS Institute press conference was reported by the Naples Daily News journalist Harriet Howard Heithaus. Click here to read her feature newspaper article.

Are Driverless Cars in Our Future?
A team lead by Prof. Chris Gerdes visited the Revs Institute in Naples, FL to instrument for testing two 1966 Ford GT 40 race cars to study human and vehicle response. In a public talk, Prof. Gerdes lined out how engineers can learn from historic vehicles to design safer and more enjoyable vehicles for the future. He showed how students are pushing ahead with driverless vehicles and opportunities to make man and machine more compatible and even learn from each other. Learn more.

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Welcome

Welcome to the Revs Institute for Automotive Research, Inc., library and archive Web site. We are an educational organization that advances the scholarly study of automotive history at The Collier Collection in beautiful Naples, Florida. Numbering more than one million items, these distinctive and highly specialized research books, documents and images are collected by Mr. Miles C. Collier to record the history of the automobile and the individuals and organizations associated with it. Scholars, journalists, automotive connoisseurs, hobbyists and preservationists will find our holdings formidable—an automotive history library and archive with few peers.

The automobile plays a quintessential role as a transformative agent in modern history. As a practical technological device, its impact is enormous. Initially resisted and then succumbed to, it stimulated the social metamorphosis of Europe and the United States over the course of the 20th century, affecting economically developed modern states. It is now transforming developing societies, particularly in Asia, as they enter the 21st century.

The research materials in The Collier Collection illuminate the complex and intertwined facets of the automobile, which range from its function as individualized transportation, its manufacturing, its force as an agent for social change, its psycho-social personification, its recreational and sporting use, and a gradual but sustained critical appreciation of the best automobiles as legitimate objects of applied art equaling in significance the finest architecture or furniture.

Research at the Revs Institute for Automotive Research, Inc., is by appointment only. Please click here to read our access requirements.

Use the menu on the left to learn more about this extensive collection of automotive print resources and images. For our Mission Statement please click here.