Inside Dezerland: 2,000 Cars and Florida’s Strangest Rainy-Day Plan
The Orlando Auto Museum packs more than 2,000 vehicles — Bond cars, Batmobiles, the world's longest car — into a former mall at the north end of I-Drive. Give it a day, not an hour.
3 minute read
Start with the number, because the number is the argument: more than 2,000 vehicles. The Orlando Auto Museum, inside Dezerland Park at 5250 International Drive, is one of the world’s largest private automobile collections — valued by the house at $200 million — spread across some 250,000 square feet of themed rooms in what used to be a shopping mall. On a corridor built on exaggeration, this is the rare attraction where the exaggeration undersells it. Our Tourism Guide entry covers the complex at Dezerland Park Orlando; consider this the case for giving the museum a full day rather than a rainy-afternoon hour.
A mall that became a museum
The building tells Orlando’s own story. It opened in the early 2000s as Festival Bay Mall, cycled through identities, and reopened in December 2020 as Dezerland Park, an 850,000-square-foot indoor entertainment center operated by developer Michael Dezer and built around his private collection. Where anchor stores once sold clothes, there are now 18 themed areas of automotive history — and the sheer acreage is the experience. You do not visit this museum so much as get lost in it productively.
The rooms that justify the trip
The James Bond exhibit is the headline: billed as the largest collection of screen-used Bond vehicles, with its own Bond lounge and restaurant attached, so the Aston Martins come with a martini-adjacent lunch option. The Bat Cave gathers Batmobiles, boats and cycles out of Gotham. Cars of the Stars covers the Hollywood fleet — the DeLorean time machine, the Ghostbusters Ecto-1, Miami Vice and Mad Max machinery among the screen-used metal — and the collection’s party piece is the world’s longest car, complete with a hot tub, a putting green and a helicopter pad, restored and on display. Around those anchors: Harley-Davidson and Great Gatsby-era rooms, Vespas and motorcycles, micro cars, military and celebrity vehicles. Car people cross the state for this. Non-car people discover, somewhere around the second Batmobile, that they may be car people.
The park around it
Dezerland’s trick is that the museum is only the anchor. Entry to the complex itself is free; attractions are paid individually. Inside the same air-conditioned footprint: what the house bills as Florida’s longest indoor go-kart track, a 300-machine arcade, bowling, laser tag, glow-in-the-dark miniature golf, bumper cars, a pinball palace, axe throwing and a Cinemark theater, plus Bass Pro Shops holding its long-standing corner. That structure changes the family negotiation completely — the car obsessive gets three museum hours while everyone else rotates through karts and bowling, and nobody has to win the argument.
How to do it well
Who should skip it, honestly
The museum rewards curiosity more than expertise, but it is not for everyone: visitors who need their attractions to move, drop or spin will find the collection’s pleasures contemplative, and very young children will get more from the park’s karts, arcade and glow golf than from the Gatsby room. That is precisely why the free-entry structure matters — the family can split by temperament under one roof and regroup for food, which no single-attraction ticket on the corridor lets you do as gracefully.
Give the museum its own block of time; two to three hours is the honest minimum for the collection, and enthusiasts should plan for more. Go on the day the weather turns — this is International Drive‘s definitive indoor plan, free parking included — and treat the rest of the park as the encore rather than the plan. It anchors the north end of the corridor, a short hop from Fun Spot and the outlets; our north end versus south end guide shows how the day fits together. Find it on the Top Spots Map and go. Just do not call it a quick stop. Two thousand cars do not do quick.
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