Apart from its obvious role as a handy means of transport, the car satisfies one basic human requirement - our need to understand as much as possible of the world around us.
J.G. Ballard, The Car, The Future

If the automobile driving along a concrete highway towards an unknown destination is, as the writer J.G. Ballard states, the key image that sums up this century, then Crash must be the key text in understanding our age. Published in 1973, the novel still has retained all of its power to shock but more importantly to explore the hidden, darker impact that technology has had on human society. Despite often being perceived as a novel full of obsessive repetition, any reading that attempts to scratch the surface of its violent prose is bound to find a text that offers almost unlimited possibilities, ideas and insights. Through Crash one literary sees the world anew.

This paper will explore different aspects of the way technology is perceived in the novel. As a starting-point four questions will be used which Ballard himself posed in his famous 1974 introduction to the French edition of Crash. Further analysis will be concerned with the question what happens to people who are left out of this new technological landscape, a subject of Ballard’s Concrete Island, also published in 1973. A last question will deal with the meaning of Crash today, for which the recent film-version by David Cronenberg is used.