Since a road accident left him with serious facial and bodily scarring, a former 'TV scientist' has become obsessed by the marriage of motor car technology with what he sees as the `raw sexuality' of car-crash victims. The scientist, along with a crash victim he has recently befriended, sets about performing a series of sexual acts in a variety of motor vehicles, either with other crash victims or with prostitutes who they contort into the shape of trapped-corpses. Ultimately, the scientist craves a suicidal union of blood, semen and engine coolant, a union with which he becomes dangerously obsessed. Based on the 1973 novel by J. G. Ballard. James and Catherine Ballard are a married couple whose sex life has been reduced to recounting tales of mutual infidelity to turn each other on. One night, James causes a head-on collision with a car carrying Dr. Helen Remington, killing her husband and severely injuring her and himself. Subsequent encounters with each other find that they are oddly sexually aroused by the danger of car accidents and potential accidents, and, with Catherine, soon fall in with a cult of car crash fetishists. The group is led by Vaughan, a former scientist twisted by his own disfigurement in an accident, and, as a result, a man obsessed with car crashes as a liberation of sexual energy. Vaughan inducts the Ballards and Dr. Remington into his surreal world of sex in the back seats of cars, re-enactments of famous car crashes (i.e. James Dean and Jayne Mansfield), viewing photos of accident victims and screenings of collision videos as pornography, and fender benders as mating rituals.