At Burning Man, you'll see lots of crazy driving: cupcake cars, an octopus, even a mobile phone

In the early years of Burning Man, the annual festival in the Nevada desert that celebrates what it calls "dreamers and doers," there were Art Cars: automobiles so baroquely decorated that the only rational reaction was to stop and gape. When the event migrated from a San Francisco beach to the Nevada desert in 1990, there were but a dozen such conveyances. The most iconic was “Oh My God!” -- a vintage VW festooned with knick-knacks. It was the brainchild of Harrod Blank, who later made the film "Wild Wheels." If the policy of letting people doll up their passenger cars had continued, the event, which began Tuesday and continues through Monday, would be inundated with customized Fords and Toyotas. As attendance grew, the dangers of that route became evident. So in the late 1990s, the Burning Man organization revised the rules. Art Cars were out; Mutant Vehicles were in. “A Mutant Vehicle,” Burning Man says, “is a unique, motorized creation that shows little or no resemblance to [its] original form, or to any standard street vehicle.” Burning Man does more than define what a Mutant Vehicle is. There are immutable rules governing every MV’s lighting, safety and sound. They must also be interactive (not just for the builders) and truly mutated: There must be a “wow factor.”...more