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"Mama, cars don't behave. They are behaved upon," the son in Driving Miss Daisy tells his mother when she tries to blame her Packard for an accident. But cars are slightly more active participants than that: they bear witness to so much human fame and folly. They reflect opulence (Jayne Mansfield's mink-trimmed Mark II) and understatement (the Volkswagen Beetle's popularity). Cars create heroes (Lee Iacocca, who conceived of the Ford Mustang and later saved Chrysler) and failures (John DeLorean, whose sleek, eponymous brainstorm proved to be an egotistical disaster). And they are the chariots of mythology: from the silver Porsche 550 Spyder that James Dean drove to his death in 1955 to the dark blue 1961 Lincoln Continental phaeton that ferried John F. Kennedy to his assassination to the white Ford Bronco that O.J. Simpson rode to infamy. Cars are America's time machines, moving us forward even as they connect us to the past. The movie Back to the Future figured that out in 1985: its time travelers zip back and forth in a reconditioned DeLorean. There may still be hope for fins yet.