I was blasting up New York's Brooklyn-Queens Expressway in that final pot-holed approach to the Triborough Bridge, and I'd just shot through the narrow passage between a Pleistocene-era garbage truck and a shiny steel tanker tagged with a host of diamond-shaped hazard signs.

"You drive a Porsche and all of a sudden you're Bruce Willis," my wife said. I like to think she meant Steve McQueen--Porsches play a part in some of my favorite movies, from Get Carter (the Michael Caine original, not the Sly Stallone abomination) to Slap Shot, and of course, Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!--but I knew her message was simply this: There are three kids in the backseat under the age of 8, and I'd better stop screwing around.

It was the beginning of my search for the perfect family car--something decidedly un-minivan but still vaguely utilitarian. For this test I reasoned that lots of power was safer for the kids, i.e., good for dodging drunks. And I reckoned that looking cool was good for the family too, since, you know, everything is so superficial now and everything. The Porsche was a Cayenne, and it was good. It looked insane--the color of a cherry tomato. In August. One you'd pay too much for at Dean & Deluca. Its color was unlike every other Cayenne I'd ever seen--far more assertive than the dung-colored models that seemed to want to hide, as if to apologize for what whiny purists called Porsche's mercenary move into the SUV market.

So it got stares, and when people saw the three baby seats in the back, it got glares.

The bright red made me paranoid, and although I enjoyed how game the car was on the hills and snaky stonewalled turns of the Taconic Parkway in upstate New York, I took it easy, especially through the speed traps of Duchess County. And for the good of the kids, too, of course.

I could tell the cars passing me were mystified by my steady clip of exactly nine miles an hour over the limit. I swear one guy mouthed the word "Asshole" as he blew past. But the highway ride was terrific, the Cayenne's smoothly forceful V8 with 340 hp helped conceal my road-warrior ways from my squeamish wife, and she said it was the most comfortable car she'd ever spent a weekend in. Off road, it did fine in the little scramble down our dirt road and across the creek to the cabin. Adding further insult to sports car fanatics, it was an automatic--all the Cayennes are--but that's a requirement for the family car search. Even its Tiptronic S shift system can be hard to concentrate on when the kids are brawling and bawling in the back, but it lets you play at real driving and even allows for enough pseudo-downshifting to satisfy the ego.

Back in the city I had terrific confidence zipping around cabs and fighting for my lane. It was the most control I'd ever felt driving something that could ferry kids: if I could think it I could do it, and without too much drama. (The BQE always brings out a little Bullitt in me). It beat the pants off my 10-year-old Volvo 850 wagon, though it wasn't nearly as big. The kids loved it, and filled all the storage spaces with their usual mash of necklaces and doll parts and stickers, but I could tell its size wasn't going to take me much past the pre-teen years, and certainly wasn't going to survive the chocolate lab my wife has been threatening me with.

In a final, mute endorsement, the family refused to speak to me after I dropped off the Cayenne and returned them to our white, banana-peel-and-empty-juice-box-filled Volvo.

--OWEN PHILLIPS

It's no secret, and no surprise, that car designers often turn to Mother Nature for inspiration.

Witness the Tatra 77, seemingly modeled on some sort of creepy ocean floor-dwelling creature from the Mesozoic. Or the Mustang, which might not look anything like a horse but, in its finest hour, evoked the wildness and speed of its namesake.

Now comes the Mercedes Bionic (above), a freaky little concept car that borrows its shape not from a predator or a wild, snorting beast of the high chaparral, but from the lowly and wonderful tropical boxfish.

According to PopSci.com, "The design team eschewed expensive, complicated and heavy fuel-cell or hybrid powertrains, opting instead for a 1.9-liter four-cylinder direct-injection turbodiesel that pushes the fishmobile to 62 mph in 8.2 seconds with a combined city/highway fuel economy of 70 mpg.

At a constant 56 mph, the concept car will return an amazing 84 mpg."

The boxfish, it seems, is a near-perfect aerodynamic machine, with a drag coefficient of just 0.06, not far from the ideal 0.04 of a water droplet. Not too shabby. We like it.  Or rather, we like the idea--a very fuel efficient car based on the slippery excellence of a wee tropical fish.

Now, would we drive one?  Never.  No way.

Face it, the car looks--well, it looks like a wee tropical fish.

But we're more than willing to keep our minds open to the idea of a streamlined Mercedes that borrows its silhouette from, say, a tiger shark. Now that would be cool--and surely that badass' drag coefficient can't be too far above 0.08 or so.

J.G. Ballard's 1973 novel, Crash, with its portrayal of an intense and harrowing subculture that fetishizes car crashes -- the gorier the better -- is probably one the most widely misinterpreted works of 20th-century fiction. Most readers and reviewers focus (understandably) on the ostensible and much-discussed "disturbing eroticism" of the book when, in fact, Ballard was less interested in the purely sexual aspect of the work than in the deeper philosophical and moral ramifications of the tale--namely, technology's power over our fantasies, and how we as humans react to catastrophe and remain sane and whole in a brutal world.

Crash, Ballard wrote in an introduction to one edition of the book, is "an extreme metaphor for an extreme situation, a kit of desperate measures only for use in an extreme crisis. Will modern technology provide us with hitherto undreamed-of means for tapping our psychopathologies?"

Keeping Ballard's own intentions in mind, Rick Pynor (founding editor of Eye magazine and co-founder of designobserver.com) recently published a piece called "Collapsing Bulkheads" on Ballardian.com, in which he offers up a slew of cover images from various editions of the book, along with some observations on the cover art elicited from Ballard himself.

For example, commenting on the 1973 edition shown here, with the huge, hideous gear shift phallically waving against a silly, monumental background, Ballard says that it's "monstrously bad, one of the worst book jackets ever -- for sheer ugliness and crudity, it's impossible to beat." But of the other image, Chris Foss's 1975 cover for Panther Books, Ballard observes that the imagery is "superb, in many ways the best ever. Quasi-realistic, but in the right way, like a movie poster of the 1950s -- brought into brilliant focus by that line -- 'A brutal, erotic novel'."

Of the image from the Livre de Poche edition (top) with the car sprouting a red, fleshy tongue that leeringly licks a woman's naked body, Poynor notes that the "tacky" cover "turns the vehicle itself into the protagonist and misses the point."

Do yourself a favor -- whether you care about Ballard's heady intentions or not, and even if you've never read the book or seen the movie, check out Poynor's piece. If nothing else, it's got some dynamite pictures of some pretty gnarly car crashes, and some of the cooler book covers you're likely to see any time soon.

--BEN COSGROVE

Noonday Press edition of Crash, 1994; design: Michael Ian Kaye and Melissa Hayden

Some ideas are so simple, so pure, so sublime that, when they arrive, it's a wonder no one thought of them before. Like dispensing dental floss from the cap of the toothpaste tube. Or selling ad space above men's urinals.

Or, as this site so wonderfully illustrates, celebrating the decades-long conflation of the automotive and female form through the immortal medium of advertising. (Yes, some people see this is as little more than the objectifcation of women. We don't disagree. Nor does it stop us from looking.)

The wonder of the site is that it travels through years and years of car ads, but never once takes its eye off of the message -- sex sells. Sometimes, as in this rather odd Triumph TR7 ad from the late 1970s, the message gets a bit garbled.

Is the woman hiding from the car? Is she waiting for it?  Is she playing a game?  Is she totally insane?

We're not qualified to judge. And, in fact, judgment doesn't enter into the equation. Instead, one simply scrolls through image after image of car and woman, car and woman and dog, car and woman and gun, until a Zen-like calm settles over the entire enterprise, and one begins to feel that the world has, finally, been reduced to its elements: steel-belted radials, a transmission that feels like butter, a groovy yellow outfit with even groovier yellow boots, and maybe a loaded 12-gauge shotgun for good measure.

--BEN COSGROVE

The 1966 Dart

We like art. We like cars. We like it when artists do things with cars.

Take a look at French artist Vidya Gastaldon's wonderfully named Apparat / Dolly Rocker (dress for a 1983 black Porsche 911), 2004. As we often do when confronting any sort of artwork that's not a Hudson Valley landscape featuring a waterfall and sunlit clouds, we came, we saw, we scratched our heads.

A dress. On a car. With -- wait, what is that on the hood? A black sun with a smiley face? And a hot-air balloon? Or is it a diamond caught between two dark, menacing clouds?  And a sun rising above mountains. And a rainbow.

"Hey," we thought, "it's a landscape, after all!"

Then, as we always do, we made the mistake of going to the experts, and were thrown for yet another loop. According to the Kunstmuseum Thun, in Switzerland (and they should know), Apparat / Dolly Rocker is "a 'costume d'apparat' or magnificent costume for a Porsche, [and] occupies a special position in the artist's work. Gastaldon dresses up the luxury car as a medieval tournament horse. As a result of this intervention, the Porsche, that lifestyle icon, is robbed of its function as a sports car. After all, in this dignified outfit, a fast ride would be inconceivable. The gown is both protection and decoration, and the same time, a soft, sensual covering, individualised and adorned with signs and symbols."

We're now willing to concede that if a medieval tournament horse can be a car and a landscape and an icon and dignified and sensual, all at the same time, then that horse/car/symbol is also very likely a genuine work of art. Even if we continue to scratch our heads over it.

Here's hoping Vidya gets her hands on a Hummer one of these days. Now that would be something to see.