What a girl wants (in a car).

The bad news is I just rear-ended a semi truck full of nuclear waste at 65 miles per hour. The good news is I only did it once.

The "semi" is really just a line of traffic cones at the Highway Survival Training course of the Bob Bondurant School of High Performance Driving in Arizona, where I am test-driving Pontiac's new Grand Prix GXP. The exercise is part of a quest to find out what a new crop of cars--purported to be designed with women in mind--can offer. The drills at the school imitate real-life driving hazards, such as a child darting into the street. I was supposed to roar toward the cones, slam on the brakes, and yank the car around the obstruction.

"What did I do wrong?" I ask after clipping the cones (and theoretically destroying half the state).

"You hit what you looked at," says Patrick Sallaway, our unflappable teacher and a race-car driver himself. "Rather than the cones," he explains, "look for the opening."

Ah! Eyes on the hole, I burn serious rubber yet feel I have all the time in the world. It's magic! Instead of a giant, unmovable object in front of me, I find an enormous gap to the right and thread through it. What's to hit?

General Motors (GM) might have you believe it's breaking ground with its new Grand Prix GXP, but this is hardly the first time a car company has thought about us ladies. Way back in the 1950s, one company offered a vehicle with pink upholstery and a matching parasol. (Surprise! It didn't go over well.) And last year, Volvo showed off a concept car entirely built by and for women.

The redesigned Grand Prix is just the latest attempt to capture female hearts and minds. It's a family sedan with a big and brawny engine. GM calls it a performance car that appeals to women. Instinct tells me that's just marketing hoo-ha, since in my job as an automotive writer I've seen that car makers typically pay lip service to women's concerns. But in the past few years, manufacturers have been noticing that women are different than men (go figure). Increasing numbers of cars come with eight-direction seat controls, a tilt and telescopic wheel, and adjustable pedals, making it possible for shorter drivers of either gender--but women in particular--to do their thing easily and comfortably. The Grand Prix adds remote start capability, which allows you to turn it on from about 65 yards away, and space for three child seats, among other things.

Still, I'm dubious about the "performance" hook: Sure, testosterone-fueled teenage boys crave speed, but who among the rest of us wants a car she has to live up to?

What GM means by "performance car for women," however, is that the Grand Prix GXP can pour it on when extra horsepower is needed, like when you're merging onto the highway, says GM engineer Sheri Hickok. I'm intrigued, because it's scary when your car doesn't have enough muscle to get you out of trouble.

The Grand Prix's power comes from its eight cylinders: The more cylinders, the more power. But the more cylinders, the more gas a car uses, too, making eights not particularly kind to the planet (or your checkbook). That's a potential drawback, seeing as more than 80 percent of women in a 2004 survey said it's important that a car be environmentally friendly. Turns out GM has answered that, to a point (as have other car companies, like Jeep with its Grand Cherokee SUV and Honda with its Accord hybrid), by creating Displacement on Demand: To improve fuel efficiency, the car in essence runs most of the time on four cylinders, but when you need a shot of power--for accelerating or passing--the capacity is there.

Now, since control is just as important as power, I jump into a special Bondurant car that can simulate any kind of skid: fishtail, spin-out, icy, rainy, understeer, oversteer, front-wheel, back-wheel, or all-wheel. These often precede a driver's worst nightmare: the rollover.

When you lose control, cutting the wheel hard is a natural response. Problem is, that action can leave you and your car upside-down. One thing that helps a car swerve without rolling is a technology known as electronic stability control (ESC), which works by braking whichever individual wheel is needed to bring the car under control. It's available in the Grand Prix and many other models, such as the Ford Explorer SUV and the Honda Odyssey minivan. Recent studies from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety found that passenger cars with ESC were 35 percent less likely to be involved in a single-car accident than the same vehicles without this feature (SUVs with ESC were 67 percent less likely).

In real life, I'm as cautious a driver as the next soccer mom. But when I nick another cone, Sallaway suggests I do the opposite of what logic tells me. "Be more aggressive when you make a sudden lane change," he says. "The car will stay with you." The next time through I cut the wheel much harder, and thanks to the stability control feature, there's none of the scary rocking I expected (and no rollover). There is something to be said for trusting that your car will do what you want it to; there's even more to be said for knowing your car will do what you need it to.

Just before we decamp for the day, the real Bob Bondurant, a former race-car driver who is now 72 years old, whirls 10 folks around his racetrack … in a van. The rest of us would have rolled that ungainly thing in the first high-speed hairpin. It's easy to see that at his level, it's the driver that counts, not the vehicle. For us regular drivers, though, it sure helps to have a car that converts us into baby Bondurants, safe at (almost) any speed.

Let your hair down: New cars geared toward women show that being a little bolder behind the wheel has a plus side.

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By Elinor Nauen

Elinor Nauen is the editor of Ladies, Start Your Engines: Women Writers on Cars and the Road. She lives in New York, where, sadly, her last car was stolen.

When it comes to safety, protecting the environment, and affordability, plenty of new models can give you what you want.