Talk about a dream job. A handful of lucky engineers just outside Paris earn their euros creating wild concept cars for Peugeot, and their only imperative is to advance the state of automotive design. While dreaming up their latest project, they hit upon a radical way to skim weight: ditch the vehicle's rear end. Specifically, they eliminated one of
the wheels and all the accompanying components, including suspension, brakes, and the actual body around it.

When Mercedes-Benz began to contemplate its next generation of high-efficiency small cars, it sought aquatic inspiration. But instead of considering obvious undersea hot rods like sharks, the Mercedes team turned to a fish that resembled a car: the tropical boxfish. A native of the Indo-Pacific region, the Ostracion cubicus is surprisingly slick. Wind-tunnel testing of a clay model revealed a drag coefficient (Cd) of just 0.06, startlingly close to the ideal 0.04 of a water droplet.