When we laid out what was coming to Detroit this year in our NAIAS preview, we never could have guessed we'd have gotten so much right. By dint of two boards — Ouija and dart — we achieved roughly 90-percent accuracy. Some might attribute this prescience instead to all the pre-packaged pre-show information we got ahead of time. But that's missing the point. We're not quite sure what the point is, but that's definitely a few meters wide of it.

So, with our awesomeness secured, it's time to pronounce. What did we like? What didn't we like? What induced fits of laughter, nausea, and explosive diarrhea? Here is where we net out.

Best Concept Car: Mazda Furai
Our favorite blue-sky vehicle at the show was the Mazda Furai, for the way it fused conceptual genius with pants-tenting execution. With the Furai, Mazda designer Franz von Holzhausen pushed his Nagare (Japanese for "flow") design vocab to its logical conclusion, taking its elegant windswept surfacing and turning it functional. Here, instead of using Nagare to simply connote movement, as in Mazda's previous concepts like the Ryuga and Taiki, von Holzhausen is employing it to aid component cooling, create downforce, and calm air flow. And what better place to prove that it works than an E100-quaffing, 450-hp, ALMS-based racing car? The Furai will do 180 mph, and is rumored to have knocked up several other cars at the show. It not only looks like a wraith, it moves like one, too: When racecar/airplane builder Swift put the initial clay model in the wind tunnel, they found it needed almost no aerodynamic alteration. As they say in the airplane business, "If it looks right, it is right."

Best Concept Car Interior: Nissan Forum
Now, we here at Motive think that minivans can take a flying, lemming-like leap off the nearest Wal-Mart parking lot, but the Nissan Forum minivan concept's interior was full of style, function, and wit. It has womb-chair seats that swivel for a little "side-gating"; a rear armrest that transforms itself into a table; Bose outdoor speakers integrated into the trailing edges of the sliding doors; and what is perhaps the greatest single parental-control feature of all time: The Time Out button on the steering wheel. One touch and it completely kills that goddamn High School Musical DVD rotting the minds of the little criminals in the back. This concept in no way redeems the entire minivan category; it just demonstrates what can be done when a few creative designers are faced with a dreadful assignment.

Best Production Car: Chevrolet Corvette ZR1
The ZR1 finds Chevrolet taking a page from the Porsche playbook. With a careful recombination of off-the-shelf and freshly developed parts — witness the Gordian knot of its dual four-blade supercharger — the Corvette emerges as something entirely new: a GT car. It's got MagneRide versus the Z06's mechanical dampers; also the power — 620-plus hp — to go up against superGTs like the Ferrari 599 GTB. And it does it all without trampling the market for the Z06. As the GT3 is to the 911 Turbo, so is the Z06 to the ZR1.

Most Unintentionally Hilarious Press Conference: Dodge Ram
Dodge shut down a freeway ramp and the street in front of the Cobo Hall convention center for its literal cattle call. It brought out about 100 head of longhorn steer to launch the new Ram pickup and to suggest...what exactly? That the Ram is slow-moving and ruminant? That, by cramming a bunch of Texas cattle onto a glass-strewn Detroit street, Dodge has utter disdain for the majesty of livestock? One bull signaled his objections by rudely humping his neighbor, which is a nice metaphor for the Nardelli era at Chrysler.

Most Quizzical: BMW X6
Okay, so you want to create a coupe. First thing you do? Add two rear doors. Then, jack it up to raise its center of gravity. Finally, add lots and lots of mass. A fine recipe for sports-car handling, no? Are we Americans so obsessed with the idea of the crossover that we want something like this, or does BMW just think we are? As one prominent pundit told us, "The X6 is merely horrible. But the next wave of BMWs is truly terrible."

Best Save: Mercedes-Benz SLR McLaren Roadster
The McMerc SLR never got the critical acclaim its two legendary makers wanted, but there was something entropic about the whole enterprise: The SLR coupe fused Mercedes-style weight to McLaren-style lethality. Plus, Paris Hilton drives one. But the car is saved, both stylistically and functionally, by the removal of its roof. Maybe it's because the racing cars that served as its inspiration — the Moss-Jenkinson 722 and contemporary F1 cars — are open, but there is something undeniably right about this rag-top SLR.

Best Feature: Beijing Li Shi Guang Ming's Mao Horn Button
Honor your Glorious Leader by pushing repeatedly on his face! While away the long unpaved slog to Brilliant Smelting Facility #223 by staring at Mao's self-satisfied mug! We've got to hand it to the Chinese: They really have their fingers on the pulse of the American market. If only our golf carts weren't nicer than their cars.

Car That Needs to be Fast-Tracked: Ford Verve
Ford parked the Verve, a sedan version of its Euro B-segment car, right next to a line of Focuses, mining the contrast for darkly comic effect. The Verve is so much more appealing, so much better packaged, and so much more modern than the wizened Focus we're currently getting, that it almost makes us forget about the C1-based Focus we're not. The Verve is coming here in 2010. That's too long to wait.

Biggest Surprise: Cadillac CTS Coupe
The best-kept secret at Detroit, the only car that didn't make it onto the web before its live reveal, was this CTS coupe. Not only was the coupe worth all the subterfuge, its introduction gave this long-since-depantsed show a much-needed jolt of energy. Reportedly inspired by the original Mercedes-Benz CLK coupe, the CTS nevertheless brings its own sense of proportion, volume, and surfacing to the two-door category. Infiniti's apparently freaked out about how it could impact its sales, and BMW should be, too: The CTS coupe, due for 2009, shows that Cadillac is serious about finding customers wherever they may be. (Pssst — a wagon version is coming next.)

Most Underreported Green Story: GM/Coskata partnership
The theme at Detroit this year is green, obviously. Everyone from Toyota to Ferrari is pushing alt.energy hard here, hoping their collective efforts will take the car industry out of the gun-sights of leftie Washington and its hairy-legged constituency. The one fuel getting a lot of play out in D.C. is ethanol, and GM, in partnership with Illinois-based start-up Coskata, is working on a way to make the biofuel easier and cheaper to harvest. Coskata says that by 2011 it will be able to make ethanol from any carbon-containing substance — old tires, orange-peel rinds, wood chips, grass. The secret is proprietary bacteria and bioreactors that produce larger amounts of so-called cellulosic ethanol at lower cost than is possible with corn. At the retail level, Coskata predicts a gallon of its ethanol will cost roughly $1 less than a gallon of gasoline. Plus, it doesn't put pressure on corn/feedstock prices, and it can be produced locally. What Coskata hasn't done is figure out how to get gas stations to give under-roof space to ethanol pumps, or to advertise its price on their marquees — the oil business isn't about to promote something hostile to its interests. Maybe our next president will be able to do something about that.

Best MILF car: Mercedes-Benz GLK Townside
Benz wheeled out Botoxed cougar Kim Cattrall for this car's unveiling. Need we say more? There's plenty of room out back for an afternoon romp with the cellphone dude/grocery bagger, and there are ample tie-downs in the rear. We hear it's good for GILFs, too!

Be sure and check out our huge collection of photo galleries from the 2008 North American International Auto Show.