Jay Leno Owns 340 Vehicles. Almost All of Them Run.
Before the Tonight Show, Jay Leno was a working mechanic in Massachusetts. Decades and roughly $100 million in cars and motorcycles later, that's still how he treats his own collection.
Before he was the host of The Tonight Show, Jay Leno worked as a mechanic at Foreign Motors of Boston, near his hometown of North Andover, Massachusetts. That detail matters more than it might seem to, because it's the difference between Leno's car collection and most other celebrity car collections: he doesn't just own the roughly 181 cars and 160 motorcycles housed in his 'Big Dog Garage' in Burbank — by most accounts, he can fix nearly all of them himself, and does.
The garage itself is a converted set of hangars near Hollywood Burbank Airport, with a machine shop — water jet cutter, CNC mill, a lathe, sheet metal equipment, welding gear — taking up a meaningful share of the floor space. Leno employs a small full-time crew led by head mechanic Bernard Juchli to keep the collection running, rather than sending cars out to specialty shops. "We don't have to wait several weeks for a custom-made part, we can make it right here," restoration specialist Per Blix has said of the setup. The collection's estimated value runs from roughly $52 million into nine figures depending on the source, but Leno has been consistent about the actual point of it: almost nothing in the Big Dog Garage is a static museum piece. It gets driven.
That philosophy nearly cost him badly in November 2022. While working underneath a 1907 White Steam Car with a friend, Leno had the friend blow air through a clogged fuel line — and was hit with a face full of gasoline that a nearby pilot light ignited instantly. He suffered second- and third-degree burns across about 7% of his body, concentrated on his face and hands, and spent 10 days at the Grossman Burn Center in Los Angeles, including hours daily in a hyperbaric oxygen chamber. He was back on stage doing stand-up within days of being released. Two months later, in January 2023, a motorcycle accident added a broken collarbone, two broken ribs, and two cracked kneecaps to the recovery. He kept working on cars anyway.
The show that built most of the public's picture of that garage, Jay Leno's Garage, started as a small web series for NBC.com before becoming a weekly CNBC series in 2015. It ran seven seasons, won a Primetime Emmy in 2016 for Outstanding Special Class – Short-Format Nonfiction Program, and was canceled from network television in January 2023 — right in the middle of Leno's recovery from the burns and the motorcycle crash. It didn't stop; it just moved. The show continues on YouTube, where it's built an audience well into the millions, still built around the same premise it always had: bring in a genuinely interesting car, and let a guy who used to fix cars for a living actually talk about how it works.
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