The Why: Your pride and joy would appreciate a more comfortable and attractive place to park its precious tires.

Subaru Rally Team USA principal Lance Smith stares into the woods, arms crossed, his eyes fixed and narrow beneath a dark pair of sunglasses. He leans over and begins to speak, but he gets only as far as, "The thing about Ken Block . . ." before being cut off by the sound of spraying gravel. A Mitsubishi Lancer Evolution launches out of a crop of trees at 70 mph aimed straight for his chest, only to pitch sideways under braking at the last minute and catapult down the road. Smith, unfazed, picks up where he left off: ". . . is that, out of all the guys here, while he may not be paid the most, he definitely puts the most into it."

Months in fleet: Three
Miles to date: 5,564

Months in service: Eight months in service
Miles to date: 20,100

Mileage to Date: 15,573
Months in Fleet: Six

Mercedes Benz has revealed the slightly tweaked styling of its flagship model. However, the real improvements are in the bits you cannot see.

Many of us grew up believing the American cultural imperative that "bigger is better." Even in the age of nanotechnology, as physical dimensions of electronic devices shrink, we are exhorted to be impressed because quantitative descriptives are bigger, thus better. Megapixels? Bigger is better. My digital cameras range from 1.1 to 6.6 Mp, far behind the state of the art; point-and-shoot cameras now seem to require at least 10 million pixels. And so it is in cars, where we demand more, whether we can use it or not. Horsepower? Of course bigger is better, so how about 500 hp or 600 or, the production pinnacle at the moment, 1001?