Miles C. Collier

From a family that helped pioneer American sports car racing in the 1930s, Miles C. Collier developed an early and lasting relationship with the automobile. His father and uncle were early members of the Sports Car Club of America, which shaped his understanding of cars not as trophies but as machines to be driven, studied, and respected. Trained as a fine artist at Yale and later earning an MBA from Columbia, Collier also raced vintage cars extensively, receiving the inaugural SVRA Driver of the Year Award in 1984.

A defining moment came in the mid-1980s, when Collier acquired the legendary Cunningham Museum collection from longtime family friend Briggs Swift Cunningham. At a time when restoration trends favored cosmetic perfection, Collier is one of several important thinkers to advance a preservation-first philosophy that prioritized originality, material integrity, and historical truth. His approach helped reset standards for evaluating and maintaining significant automobiles.

Building on that foundation, Collier convened international symposia on preservation theory and technique and founded Revs Institute (Revs) in Naples, Florida. Today, Revs is a center for scholarly study, stewarding more than 100 historically significant, fully operational automobiles and the world’s reference and most useful resource for automobile archives and research.

In his book, The Archaeological Automobile, Collier argues that automobiles are among the most consequential technological artifacts of the twentieth century and should be treated as Active Matter, with the same rigor as fine art or architecture. In February 2026, Collier was honored by the Automotive Hall of Fame (AHF) with the 2026 Distinguished Service Citation, an award shared by automotive legends such as Carroll H. Shelby (1987).