Skoda Museum

Vaclav Laurin and Vaclav Klement began making bicycles in Mlada Boleslav in 1895 - the story is that Klement wrote to a German manufacturer complaining about a bicycle and was told to write in German, and decided to build his own - moved to motorcycles in 1899, cars in 1905, and merged with the Skoda works of Plzen in 1925. The museum sits in the original foundry buildings at the factory gate and shows about fifty vehicles across the whole span: the earliest Laurin and Klement motorcycles and cars, the interwar models, the original Octavia and Felicia and the 1100 racing cars, prototypes that never went into production, and the post-1991 Volkswagen period. There is a depot section with a hundred more vehicles behind glass. Factory tours of the current assembly lines run separately and must be booked well ahead.

History

The museum opened in 1995 for the centenary of the company, known until 1925 as Laurin & Klement and one of just four carmakers in the world with an unbroken history going back to 1895. It occupies a former factory building of the firm in which cars were made until 1928, next to the large production site, and a remodelled museum opened in the autumn of 2012 (Wikipedia, Škoda Museum).

The main sights

• Bicycles to cars - the line from 1895 through motorcycles to the present.
• About fifty vehicles - shown in the original foundry buildings.
• Prototypes that never ran - models developed and abandoned.
• A depot of a hundred more - the reserve collection behind glass.

When to go

All year. Half a day.

Good to know

Factory tours are separate, must be booked well ahead, and have age and clothing rules. The museum is at the works, not in the town centre. Mlada Boleslav itself has little else for visitors.

Nearby

Prague is sixty kilometres south-west; Bohemian Paradise is north-east.

Key facts