For Garmin, is 30 seconds of Super Bowl exposure worth $2.7 million when you're a small company, at least small compared to GM, Budweiser, and FedEx? For the second straight year, Garmin bought into the Super Bowl, this year with
Napolean, a whimsical dash through France by the emperor in a classic French Panhard car en route to a date with destiny - or what turns out to be a ride more in keeping with his size. If Napolean wasn't the best, it didn't stumble as badly as some of the other 2008 commercials nor Garmin's panned 2007 Super Bowl debut, Maposaurus.

Car companies and tech companies made up a good chunk of the Super Bowl ad space, including:

• Bridgestone Firestone ads ranked first and fifth by Spotbowl, one of many sites ranking Super Bowl, for ads about Bridgestone tires avoiding a squirrel in the road (understandably humane) and about avoiding Richard Simmons (didn't he used to be famous as a fitness buff?) and Alice Cooper.


• Audi's ad for its R8 sports car played on the Godfather theme: Inside a mansion, a man awakens in horror to find his hands covered with grease not blood and hood of an old-fashioned luxury car under the sheets. The ad dissolves to the new R8 zooming down the highway. The tagline: "Old luxury has been put on notice."


• General Motors played it somber - fork over the $2.7 million per half minute, don't do anything tricky - to promote the GMC Yukon hybrid. The ad starting with a stick figure pushing a mass uphill and appeared at first to be (yawn) for financial planning or life insurance. GM's point: Apply enough hybrid technology you developed (in a joint project with DaimlerChrysler and BMW) and you can develop a nearly three-ton SUV that gets better city mileage than a gasoline-engine Toyota Camry, a figure we verified in our recent
  review.
  


• Hyundai got mixed marks for ads about its new Genesis luxury sedan, although its message was crystal clear: size and trappings of a Mercedes-Benz S-Class or BMW 7-Series for the price of a C-Class or 3-Series this summer.


• Toyota's ad for Corolla was one of many playing on animals: The new Corolla is so soundproofed a ferocious (but resting) badger in the passenger seat won't be aroused and attack the driver even when a cannon goes off outside. The Toyota Highlander ad was similar wacky, about racing three-wheel pedal scooters.


• Indy car racer Danica Patrick's commercial for GoDaddy.com - the tame version Fox and the NFL allowed to run -- involved her pulling down the zipper (slightly) on her racing jacket, then urging viewers to go see the real commercial on the GoDaddy site. "A domain and a web site from GoDaddy.com give me all the exposure I need ... " Danica says, and that's the tasteful part of the commercial. You could also look for the ad in the dictionary under "sophomoric."


• Dell's XPS commercial did a nice job casting computers as desirable lifestyle objects, a path blazed by Apple starting back in 1984's SuperBowl.

Tell us about your favorite car tech ads - and the others - in feedback below.