This dreamlike logic hung over the entire afternoon. In the bright afternoon light the several hundred visitors took on the appearance of mannequins, no more real than the plastic figures which would play the roles of driver and passengers in a front-end collision between a saloon car and a motorcycle. JG Ballard - Crash One of the key scenes in JG Ballard's brilliant novel Crash is set at the Road Research Laboratory - but what might the crash test dummies involved have made of it? The animation tool Xtranormal* made it all too easy to speculate...*sadly Xtranormal is no longer with us.