Leaving her home in Seattle in midsummer to drive "the long way round" to the Detroit Auto Show in midwinter, Lesley Hazleton, embarks on a six-month journey to visit the holy places for cars -- where they're raced, displayed, crashed, tested, and made -- as she seeks to understand our deep fascination with automobiles.<P>A committed environmentalist in thrall to the internal combustion engine, she explores her own worship of speed during assaults on the landspeed record at the Bonneville salt flats; negotiates the famed off-road Rubicon Trail across the Sierras; and attends a crash conference in Albuquerque, where the cold fact that "when metal and flesh collide, metal always wins" sheds light on our erotic fascination with cars. Halfway through her journey Hazleton's father, the man who taught her to drive, dies suddenly, and her trip becomes an odyssey of grief and memory, a meditation on life and death that culminates in Hazleton's own car crash on a snow-driven highway and her own confrontation with mortality.