Most days, the Packard Proving Grounds are quiet. A cluster of Cotswold-style buildings sits along Van Dyke Avenue between 22 Mile and 23 Mile roads in Shelby Township, a lodge and a repair garage and a squat brick tank-testing building that look less like an automotive shrine than like a small English village that happened to land in Macomb County. On Sunday, October 25, from 1 to 5 p.m., the gates swing open for the site's Annual Fall Open House, an afternoon of free admission, Packard history and community fun.
The event is a rare chance to walk a place that was, for three decades, one of the most important pieces of real estate in the American auto industry. It is also, by any measure, one of the more unusual historic sites in the country: according to the nonprofit that runs it, the Packard Proving Grounds Historic Site is one of only three automobile museums in the United States located on property once owned by the parent automaker, and the only automobile museum in the world located on its own proving grounds.
The story starts with a bad car. The Packard brothers, James Ward and William Doud, founded their company in Warren, Ohio, in 1899, and the origin story that has followed the brand ever since is that the brothers bought a Winton, found it unreliable, and decided they could build something better. Detroit investors lured the young company to the Motor City by 1903, and Packard grew into one of the great luxury marques in the world, the car of choice for Hollywood stars and, by one accounting, the emperor of Japan.
As the cars got faster and more complicated, the company needed somewhere to abuse them. In 1926 Packard began building a dedicated proving ground on open farmland north of Detroit; the site was dedicated on June 14, 1928. It eventually sprawled over more than 500 acres and included a 2.5-mile oval test track, an airplane hangar for testing the aircraft engines Packard built, a water tower, a repair garage, and a gate lodge for the grounds manager. The lodge and the repair garage were designed by Albert Kahn, the Detroit architect whose factories helped define industrial America; the tank test building was designed by William E. Kapp. The complex was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2007.
The proving ground's history runs straight through the middle of the American century. During World War II the site was leased to Chrysler Defense, which used it to test tanks and other armored vehicles in 1944 and 1945. Packard took it back after the war, but the company's 1950s merger with Studebaker drained it financially, and operations at the grounds ceased on August 15, 1956. Curtiss-Wright leased the property, then Ford bought it in 1961 and used the facilities for production and emissions testing. By the late 1990s, most of the original buildings were gone or threatened, the track long since broken up, the acreage sold off. What survived was saved by preservationists and volunteers, and it is their work that visitors walk through today.
That history is the reason the open house is worth the drive. The fall event is built around the cars themselves: classic car displays, Packard taxi rides, live music, food trucks, and a local vendor market, with donations welcome to support the ongoing preservation of the site. The nonprofit's current headline restoration project is the World War II Tank Test Center, which is being brought up to code for continued use as a historic site and gathering space.
There is no ticket and no capacity barrier, which matters for a place like this. Historic tours at the grounds normally require advance scheduling and a $10 per-person donation to ensure a volunteer docent is on hand; the open house removes that friction entirely. You can simply show up, wander between buildings that once housed engineers tearing apart luxury cars and testing aircraft engines, and stand on ground where Packard's test drivers once ran laps.
It is a strange and specific kind of Michigan afternoon: a fall Sunday, a free gate, a cluster of Albert Kahn buildings in the middle of suburbia, and a century of automotive history that almost didn't survive. The Packard Proving Grounds Historic Site is at 49965 Van Dyke Ave. in Shelby Township. The open house runs Sunday, October 25, 2026, from 1 to 5 p.m., and admission is free.