03/05/2007 08:38:00 AM 
J G Ballard explored the fetishism of the car wreck in his book, Crash that David Cronenberg turned into one of the weirdest films ever made.
Thanks to the internet, crash fetishism is alive and well and has become a media in its own right.
Most of this focus is not on the macabre, but revolves around very expensive and exotic sports cars that get wrecked.
The appeal lies in seeing the devastation and the humbling of the supercar from potent exotic machine to crumbled wreck.
It's automotive ultra violence.
Wrecked Exotics is an example of the genre; a site where thrill seekers can get their fix. The site was started in 2002 by Greg Carlson.
Wrecked Exotics clearly explains the mission on the site's home page and tries to suggest a positive rationale beyond the head turning voyeurism.
"Welcome to the internet's largest collection of exotic car crash photos. We display over 6,000 wrecked exotic cars to show you the real consequences of reckless driving.
These car crash pictures involve some of the most expensive automobiles ever produced including Lamborghini, Ferrari, Mclaren F1, Bugatti and more. All in all, you'll find almost a quarter of a Billion Dollars worth of damage within this car crash collection. That's enough to make any insurance company weep."
In October 2006, Wired wrote an amazing story about Gizmondo; a failed handheld gaming company. The story details the investigation into the criminal connection begins when one of the company's founders wraps his Ferrari Enzo around a telephone pole.
"In the days following the crash, gearheads were aghast. The wreck had "destroyed one of the finest cars on earth, maybe the finest," Chris Banning, vice president of the national board of the Ferrari Owners Club, told the Los Angeles Times. "It's like taking a van Gogh painting and burning it." Ferrari manufactured a mere 400 of the gull-winged vehicles, incorporating its Formula One racing technology into a V-12 engine capable of going from 0 to 62 mph in 3.7 seconds and reaching a top speed of 217 mph. Originally priced at around $650,000 and sold only to previous Ferrari owners, the car's resale value had risen to roughly $1.2 million. "I would rank it as probably the most incredible exotic-car crash in history," says Gregg Carlson, who runs WreckedExotics.com."
According to Wired, within weeks, wrecked exotic fans had turned the Enzo into a celebrity; making t-shirts and selling pieces of the wreckage on E-Bay.
Today, it looks as if today wrecked car fans will be in something of a frenzy, because yesterday, a Bugatti Veyron, the world's most expensive car was wrecked a first for this model on public roads.
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