So, in trying to get our minds off Trabants, and tiny cars, and ancient, broken-down beasts, we turned to another growing obsession: cop cars, and found Mancunian blogger Deputy Dog's best emergency services vehicles ever made.

There's the absurd use of the Porsche Cayenne as an ambulance in Germany (top).  We don't know how this sick woman will ever fit in the back, but if she does, we have no doubt she'll live.   (See our own test drive of the Cayenne under unusual circumstances here.

We love that the Italians used the Ferrari 250 GTE (at right) to chase the bad guys in 1962 but there's something opera buffa about the lone blue light on top.  The blue and yellow checkered Lamborghini Murciélago LP640 (below) used in the UK -- which must come across like God himself pulling you over -- is probably more effective. Here's a video of it in action.

(We found Deputy Dog via the great design site Core77 (which got it from our all-time favorite Design Observer) while admiring their links to our slideshow of Woodies by photographer Bill Owens.)

The successful introduction of the Mini Cooper here in the states -- due in no small part to an almost unfailingly clever series of marketing campaigns -- illustrates once again that, while Americans remain obsessed with the big and the gaudy, there's still a soft spot in the public's heart for the small-in-stature, big-on-imagination means of personal transport.

For those of us who are fascinated by exactly how little it really requires -- in metal, rubber, glass, horsepower, leather -- to create a genuine, usable, and even cool little car, the Petersen Automotive Museum has just the ticket: a show called Microcars: TheMinimum in Motoring, running until early February, 2008. (Pictured: The Eshelman, which the Petersen site informs us "was offered as both a child's car having a two horsepower engine and an adult car with a three-horsepower engine. It was intended for short, local trips and could be readily transformed into a riding lawnmower.")

The exhibition's website includes, of course, some remarkable photographs of microcars through the years, as well as an informative essay on the phenomenon, which begins thusly:

"The world's smallest vehicles, microcars are minute passenger automobiles normally powered by tiny gasoline engines. In countries where vehicles are taxed based on their engine displacement, microcars are far more affordable than full-size cars and accessible to virtually everyone. In certain areas, the smallest microcars are even classified as motorcycles and no license is required to operate them. People from all walks of life drive microcars, especially in Japan and older European cities with extremely narrow streets, and they are also used by businesses for local deliveries of small goods. Microcars are inexpensive to maintain, can be parked in even the smallest spaces, and handle better than traditionally sized cars due to their lower weight. But the microcar's biggest attraction is its extremely low cost of operation, a quality appreciated by motorists in countries where gasoline costs three to five times more than it does in America."

On that last point, if on nothing else, we beg to differ. The microcar's biggest attraction is not, in fact, its "low cost of operation." The appeal of microcars is that they're tiny!

Take our advice: If you live in LA, or are headed there any time soon, make your way to the Petersen, if only for a few hours. These days, how often do you get to see cars that make a Mini Cooper feel like an Escalade?

The Messerschmitt Tiger was one of very few microcars with sporting potential and many were raced. Unlike other Messershmitts, which had a single rear wheel, the Tiger was equipped with two rear wheels for improved traction and stability.

(Read David Knowles' test drive of the barely street legal GEM car here.)

Try as we may, we just can't get enough of those Trabbis.

Witness first hand the story of the little-engine-that-couldn't in this hilarious video of a Trabant's failures as a tow truck.

What's the best tool for shaping the Trabant's Duroplast body? A swift kick with a stiff boot, of course, as you'll see in these videos from an East German factory, taken from the aptly titled "The Making of the World's Crappiest Car." (Style note: Evidently, even workers in a communist utpopia find it hard to resist the appeal of a well-cropped mullet.)

Trabbi-minded folks share their pics with the BBC. A graffiti Trabbi breaks through the Berlin wall (as two heavyweights, Brezhnev and Honecker, make out in the background). A Trabbi is transformed into a sunflower field with wheels. There's nothing, it seems, that a Trabbi can't (or won't) get involved in.

What's worse than actually owning a Trabant? Waiting six years for your government to finally issue you one. Take a cheery little tour through the process and find out what happened to all those cars after the wall came down.

Marvels of efficiency, yes, but that doesn't mean Trabbis don't know how to party. See before-and-after shots of the show-stealing Trabants that rocked the stage during U2's Zootopia Tour:

-- WILL REITER

Here we've been writing about Trabants all year and we didn't even realize it's the plastic-bodied two-stroke shrimp's 50th birthday. But a gathering of nostalgic East Germans in the Trabant's hometown of Wickau recently made front page news and prompted us to delve deep into Flicker for a look at alt-Trabant culture.

One photo stream, for example, seems to bounce back and forth between a Trabbi mud rally and a demolition derby, while the custom jobs, like the amazing specimen at left (see more of Spit_Mkl's great Flickr shots here) and this sleek wonder from a 2006 show in Leipzig, are quite the mixed bag. (Suddenly, Liz Cohen's Bodywork project -- where the once-conservative workhorses morph into fun-loving, street-chic El Camino-flavored lowriders -- doesn't seem so far-fetched.)

And let us not forget the stream that, truth be told, we feel unqualified to intelligently comment upon, and yet also feel oddly compelled to share with the world: the ingenious Trannies in Trabbis.

Surprisingly, this ironic treatment of the communist-era subcompact is not unique to decadent Western artists (or to the band U2). As Gunther Hohne writes in his book DDR Design, which Jennifer Stahl translated for us in January, the attitude was ubiquitous:

"When people started calling the 'new' Trabant 'Trabbi,' the word conveyed more condescension than love, in the same way that calling Communist Party Leader Erich Honnecker 'Honnie' implied everything but 'honey.' Both were pathetic contemporaries never freely elected by the East German people. After German reunification the 'Trabbi' advanced as a nostalgic East German cult object only among the younger generation, which saw in it a comical, noisy, stinky, but fun little car."

Though Hohne ended his rumination with an at-once warm and dismissive farewell -- "Peace to you, car body, old plastic execration! -- it's hard to say good bye.

A photo that says it all, from "TheTrabant Model of Science" site.

Gotta hand it to the Times.

Cara Buckley's piece today on NYPD sirens had something inspired about it -- a sort of "Duh, why didn't anyone else think of writing about that?" obviousness that the paper of record still manages to occasionally pull off.

The most striking item in the article is the mention of a siren known as The Rumbler, which sounds like a cross between a classic wailing cop car and a wavering "Stay the hell away from me!" warning emitted by pretty much any spaceship from a 1950s sci-fi flick.

For good measure the beast also bodyrocks the neighborhood with what Buckley describes as "bone-rattling vibrations."

Just one more reason why, when you come across a crime scene in the Big Apple, it's best to just keep moving folks, keep moving. It's all over. Nothing to see here.

We're going to report this one straight, for several reasons: 1) We love the idea, 2) we feel that Liz Cohen knows what the hell she's doing when it comes to "conceptual" art, 3) we really, really like Trabants, and 4) we really, really like bikinis.

Here's the general idea of Cohen's piece (first conceived in 2004) from the marvelous pushthebuttonplay.com. Deal with it.

"BODYWORK is the attempt to transform a German car into an American car. Cohen bought a Trabant in Berlin and shipped it to America. Upon its arrival, the effort to transform the Trabant into a lowriding Chevrolet El Camino begins. Cohen in a search for her own place in the lowrider world works at a custom autobody shop and additionally works out with a personal trainer to become a lowrider bikini model. In the summer of 2004 the bikini model/car customizer and the Trabant turned El Camino will do a tour de force of lowrider competitions to show off their new looks.

"BODYWORK will be shown as a video installation including the car that constantly transforms back and forth from Trabant to El Camino lowrider and a hip hop music video."

Keep your Picassos and your Hirsts. We'll stick with women who know how to chop a car down. Happily, for those living in or visiting Santa Fe this summer, the Center for Contemporary Arts will feature BODYWORK and other pieces examining the power and mystery of the lowrider tradition, "and how it is disseminated and incorporated into new cultures, conversations, and contexts."

Yes. Cultures and contexts forever, of course. But just a note of advice, CCA: make sure that you have some tricked-out cars on the scene that are hopping like mad. All right?

-- BEN COSGROVE

Liz Cohen and her tricked-out Trabant.

The Bugatti stank.

That wasn't an aesthetic judgment from the Greenwich Concours d'Elegance, where a rare 1938 Type 57C Bugatti Atalante coupe sat beneath a Christie's auction tent. Instead, the moldy reek that hit my nostrils, the antithesis of new-car smell, testified to the 45 years the Bugatti had spent decaying in a suburban New York garage. The seller was John W. Straus, 87, a car collector and retired Macy's executive who was instrumental in the store's Thanksgiving Day parade.

Yet to the unnamed collector who paid $852,500 for the Bugatti -- more than double the pre-auction price estimate -- the car's scrapyard condition was a plus. The Bugatti was a lost-but-recovered treasure, a faded canvas for a historically correct restoration that will require thousands of labor hours and cost $200,000 or more.

"The owner can now treat the car and the restoration with the respect it deserves," said Rik Pike of Christie's.

The supercharged, eight-cylinder Atalante was the brainchild of Jean Bugatti, the son of company founder Ettore Bugatti. The culmination of Jean's engineering and design talents, the Atalante's triumph marked his ascendancy in the company. But the marque's future died with the scion in 1939, when Bugatti was killed while testing the 57C racer on a highway in the Alsace, near the company's home in Molsheim, France.

The Bugatti was the star of the Christie's roster, but it wouldn't have cracked a Top 10 of the most valuable classic automobiles at the 12th annual concours on the shores of Greenwich Harbor.

As with older and more-established concours -- Pebble Beach in California and Meadow Brook in suburban Detroit are Nos. 1 and 2 -- the blue blazers and blue bloods were out in force. But in contrast to tweedier-than-thou Pebble Beach, Greenwich has a more relaxed vibe that extends to judging. So-called "French rules" urge judges to rely on their knowledge but to also vote with their hearts. Actor Edward Herrmann, the concours' chief judge, had a simple message for his colleagues.

"Don't choose an ugly car," he said.

That edict was followed in the Best in Show category, which happened to honor another Bugatti Type 57, this one a roadster from 1937, owned by noted Greenwich collector Malcolm Pray.

Not every auction car required a six-car garage or a seven-figure checking balance. My budget eye was drawn to a 1968 Mercedes SL 280 California Coupe, about as head-turning a car as one could find for the $24,200 it fetched.

Among my favorites from the first of two show days, which largely focussed on American iron:

A 1934 Packard LeBaron sport coupe (left), one of only four made, which took Best in Show for American-made cars. It's owned by Joe and Margie Cassini, a New Jersey couple whose Horch 853A had previously taken Best in Show at both Pebble Beach and Meadowbrook. Joe Cassini said that Packard had spent $18,000 to build each of the cars -- a shocking sum in '34 -- but sold them new for $10,000, as much as the market would bear. The Packard featured amazing Art Deco detailing inside and out: Burl walnut, a sliding sunroof, a gas cap hidden in the trunk to avoid breaking up the car's symmetrical lines.

A 1966 Ford GT40, the street version of the Motown racers that hammered Ferrari on their own haughty turf at the 24 Hours of LeMans in ‘66, sweeping the top three spots to leave Enzo Ferrari crying in his Chianti.

A 1937 Cord 812 Coupe, one of only three made from the company that produced some of the most beautiful and advanced cars of its era.

A 1948 Pontiac 28 Silver Streak wagon, in all its wood-paneled glory, topped with a surfboard for this show.

The Lincoln Indianapolis, a creamsicle-orange, one-off design fantasy from 1955, bodied by Italian coachbuilder Boano, once owned by Henry Ford II.

-- LAWRENCE ULRICH

While you might not want to see any of these black-and-whites (and blue-and-whites, and green-and-whites) in your rearview, you still might want to swing by the New York City Police Museum this weekend to check out the Seventh Annual Vintage Police Car Show.

Classic patrol cars -- from a 1939 Ford Highway Patrol vehicle to a still-sleek 1971 NYPD Harley-Davidson -- will be displayed next to famous wheels from television, including that original (and still the best) Gotham City crime-fighting machine: the Batmobile.

Maybe you read about the recent little Barack Obama-Ford Motor Co. dust-up in the paper of record yesterday. It sounded, for a moment, as if Ford might have caught the 2008 presidential candidate in another of the small but telling lapses that have dogged his young campaign -- and it seemed that the auto giant might actually have gained, for once, the high moral ground in the ongoing debate over what Detroit has or has not done to address issues like global warming, America's addiction to foreign oil, etc.

"Mr. Obama," the Times reported, "recently lectured Detroit's automakers, saying they were doing too little to reduce oil consumption. Last week, at a policy conference on Mackinac Island in northern Michigan, [Ford chairman] William Clay Ford Jr. told business leaders that Mr. Obama should have done a little more investigating before he spoke.

"'I was very disappointed,' Mr. Ford (below) said when an audience member asked about Mr. Obama's remarks. 'I would love to invite him to our Chicago assembly plant, which is in his state, where we make a vehicle that's more fuel-efficient than the one he's currently driving.'

"Senator Obama drives a Chrysler 300C sedan, which is rated at 17 miles a gallon in city driving and 25 on the highway. The Ford Five Hundred and Mercury Montego, which Ford builds at its Chicago assembly plant, are rated at 21 in the city and 29 on the highway."

All well and good -- except that, according to an Obama spokesman, the senator no longer owns the 300c. He got rid of it "a few weeks ago."

He does, however, own a Ford. A Ford Escape. A Ford Escape Hybrid.

No idea why the Times didn't know that little fact before running their piece. But one of two things is likely to emerge from this admittedly minor blip on the campaign radar: Edwards, Clinton, and the rest of the folks out there on the hustings are probably calling home and making sure that either the Prius is parked prominently in the driveway, or that their garages' windows have been quickly, thoroughly, conveniently painted over.

This weekend is the last chance for lovers of sexy, curvy, streamlined autos to get close up and personal with a veritable armada of the sexiest, curviest, streamliniest beauties ever built. The Phoenix Art Museum's marvelous "Curves of Steel" exhibition closes on Sunday, June 3, and as the museum's site makes clear, Phoenix is "the only place Curves of Steel will be shown." (Pictured: A 1938 Darracq-Talbot Lago T-150.)

The show features more than two dozen amazing examples of what the curators point out was not merely a stylistic trend, but a genuine movement and, in some cases, a practical, real-world philosophy.

"Amidst the Great Depression and strains of the impending war, the sleek, futuristic look of streamlined design [like the 1938 Delage D8-120's below] represented an optimistic future of science and technology and provided a stimulus to the market by making former more ornamental styles look outmoded."

Optimism. Market stimuli. Indeed. But there's also another factor worth considering here, one that is only hinted at in the thoughtful, cogent remarks on the museum's website: namely, that almost all of these vehicles look as if, given half a chance, they might drop in unexpectedly, drink up all your booze, steal your girl, and then drive off in a remorseless (and debonair) swirl of dust, punctuated by the evocative aroma of burning rubber and, probably, expensive cigars.

And you know what? You'd still think they're cool.

--BEN COSGROVE

1938 Dubonnet Hispano H-6C Xenia

1937 Cord 812