Quick Stats: Penn Jillette Magician, Comedian, Host, Author Daily Driver: Two 2005 Mini Coopers (Penn's rating: 10 on a scale of 1 to 10) Other car: 2006 GMC Yukon Denali (rating: 5)Favorite road trip: LA to NYCar he learned to drive in: 1964 Ford FalconFirst car bought: 1970s Datsun B210 station wagon

You may not always agree with Penn Jillette's beliefs, but you've got to love his passion and conviction. And when it comes to cars, it's all about size, baby.

But it's not what you might think. Like the rest of this chat with Motor Trend Online about life, the universe and everything (like the best car to get you schtupped in Hollywood), there's a sense of paradox and irony in Jillette's life.

At 6'7" Jillette drives one of the smallest cars around -- a 2005 Mini Cooper. While seeing someone of his height get out a Mini might seem like the kind of comedic magic trick he performs on stage with Teller, Jillette liked the Mini so much, he bought two more. He later gave one away. "A friend of mine really, really liked the car, so I gave it to him. I'm like Elvis, 'Buy 'em a Cadillac, baby,'" he says, imitating that famous voice.

Like Elvis, Jillette painted his Minis pink, only different. "It's 'stripper-inner-labia pink,'" Jillette seems to enjoy saying. "It's my own color. I like things matching. I have an upright bass, a drum kit and a grand piano that's the same color. I tend to over think things."

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Jillette's musings spill over into his vanity license plates, which say "Atheist," "Godless" and "No God."

"Strangely enough, they wouldn't give me 'Infidel,'" he says.

In the early '90s, Jillette moved to Las Vegas from New York, where he didn't have a car.

"My feeling was I would get an Elvis pink Cadillac," Jillette says. "Then I figured, all I care about in the car is that it's a comfortable seat that takes me from one place to another, with a good stereo."

Jillette went to Cadillac, Mercedes-Benz, and BMW dealers. "I said, 'I have plenty of money; money is no object. All I want to do is sit in a car that's comfortable, but I'm VERY, VERY, comfortable with my penis size, so I don't need a car that goes fast or looks in any way attractive. '"

Finding a car where his head didn't bump and his knees didn't hit the steering wheel wasn't an easy feat.

"They put me in a zillion cars and they're all engineered for 6'4." They would say, 'Basketball players buy these Bimmers and have the seats lowered.' I don't want to spend $120,000 dollars for a car that I'd then have to get the seat ripped out! That's stupid," he complains.

So Jillette settled on a Bronco and, confident in his manhood, promptly painted it pink. "I'm very happy being big and effeminate," he says.

He later switched to the Volkswagen New Beetle. "I read on some tall person Web site they're engineered to 6'6." The Bug was much more comfortable than the Bronco."

The new Mini Cooper later caught his eye, and Jillette went to the dealer to try it on for size. "I thought it would be like a clown car -- it would look really funny coming out of that," he says. "BMW engineers their BMWs at 6'4" and their Minis for 6'6." I believe the reason is they want BMWs to be sleek, perfect automobiles, and the Minis they don't care about. If you go to big guy Web sites, which you should be at for all sorts of reasons, they will tell you that a Mini Cooper or a Volkswagen are the way to go."

It took the over thinker a while to figure out what he would rate his Minis. "I saw that everybody says 9 about their car," he says with a giggle, referring to past Celebrity Drive columns. He decides on a perfect 10 "because no one else does" that.

Drivers in Vegas may have seen Jillette hitchhiking next to his cars. "I'd run out of gas all the time. What I do is get out of my car and people recognized me. I'd say, 'If you give me a ride to the theater, I'll give you tickets to our show,'" he says, with a boisterous laugh.

Besides running on empty, Jillette also likens his driving style to that of a little old lady, staying below the speed limit. "I'm awful with cars. I don't look at any of the lights. I don't pay any attention, I play my iPod very, very loud. I just sit in a chair till I'm at work," he says.

Car talk inevitably shifts to penis size. "When they talk about 'this grips the road,'" Jillette says. "When they talk about 'accelerating around corners,' when they talk about 'zero to 60,' anybody that talks about that, I just go, 'Boy, you must have a small penis.' I just want to sit in a chair and go to work. I don't understand it, I've never understood it."

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Jillette only drives to Starbucks and the theater at the Rio All-Suite Hotel & Casino, a fact he realized only when he was at the car dealer about to buy a second car. "It's not like I do joyriding," he says. "The guy talked me up to some really expensive Audi that had all the bells and whistles." Then the salesman asked Jillette how much time he spends in the car. He's only in it 15 minutes each way, five days a week. "I went, 'Oh, I don't need this car. I'll just get another Mini.' His whole argument broke down when he made me think about how long I was in it."

Jillette didn't even thinking about getting a supercharged Cooper S. "F---, no. I don't need to go fast! I'm not a criminal," he chuckles. "No one's ever chasing me."

But just in case his daughter gets a speeding ticket, she was given a cop-friendly name. "She's now fully aware that her name is Moxie CrimeFighter Jillette," he says of Moxie, who turns 4 this month. The word "moxie" started out as a brand of soda. "The nutty thing about it is because of the ad campaign, it became a word for 'gumption,' separate from the soda. It's as though the word 'Kodak' became a quality of a human being instead of just a name of a camera. I find that fascinating."

Mike Jones, the piano player for the Penn and Teller show, suggested her middle name from a character in Jillette's novel "Sock." "One of the characters says, 'Don't call me by my name anymore, from now on call me CrimeFighter.' I said, 'It'll be great, because when she's pulled over at 16 by a police officer, she can pull out her driver's license and go, 'Officer, we're on the same side. My middle name is CrimeFighter!'" Jillette says exuberantly.

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Her middle name has already worked. "My wife was speeding, with her in the back seat, and a cop pulled her over. My wife said, 'Officer, are you aware that in the backseat here is Moxie CrimeFighter?' The police officer went, 'I heard about her. That's her middle name, right?' He went to the back seat and said, 'Hello, Moxie, is your middle name CrimeFighter?' She said, 'Yes.' The police office said, 'Well, I guess she can watch out for you then, carry on. '"

Jillette breaks out into contagious laughter. "At the age of 1 years old she already beat a ticket with her name. So I think that's worth it in itself, right?"

Jillette's wife, Emily, drives a Fiat Spider. "Racing green, with brown seats. I can't drive it; I can't be a passenger in it. I've ridden in it for a mile, but I can't go much further; my knees don't fit."

They also drive what Jillette calls an "enormous, monster" 2006 GMC Yukon Denali, bought after their son Zolten Penn Jillette was born (Zolten is his wife's maiden name). "Zoltan is the name of Dracula's dog and also of course means 'king' in Hungarian," he says proudly. "He's the Hungarian Elvis!"

Back on topic, Jillette gives the Denali a 5 rating. "It's so big the mirrors have to fold in. But with two toddlers, they're proppy -- a lot of props with them."

But the Denali is too big and Jillette is thinking about getting a new car. "I'm in this tough position because I'm really pro-technology and I'm really anti-hippie, so I'd really love to have a hydrogen car, an electric car, because the technology is so cool. But I don't want to look like Cameron Diaz's dipshit. So I can't have a Prius," he laughs.

Although he agrees he looks the part of a hippie. "My hair is way, way long," he says. "I've hitchhiked across the country a zillion times. I've ridden in every car. I was never a hippie. It takes more than long hair. There has to be some drugs involved; you should be in some way politically liberal."

The cerebral, Ayn Rand-reading atheist who calls himself "purely an objectivist" lives a very clean life in Sin City. On his daily drive to work, Jillette never sees the Strip and he never walks through a casino.

"I don't gamble, I don't drink. I've never had a sip of alcohol or any recreational drug in my life, never even a puff of marijuana. I'm absolutely a puritanical atheist. Except sex and God -- I'm very, very puritanical. It's that belief in God thing that f---s me up from being a fundamentalist." Although cigarettes are part of his act. "I'm a fire eater, so the punch line to a fire eating bit is to light a cigarette. So yes, a puff of a cigarette, but I don't smoke cigarettes."

Car he learned to drive in

"The car I learned to drive in is also the car I learned to f--- in -- it was my mom's Ford Falcon," Jillette says of the 1964 Falcon.

Jillette grew up in Greenfield, Massachusetts, which felt worlds away from the city, although it was near college towns. "I was 20 minutes north of Northampton, Amherst, Mount Holyoke, lesbian central," he says.

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While Jillette has a lot of friends who are scientists, he didn't go to college, except when he sat in on classes at U. Mass Amherst while in high school. "I finished high school on a plea bargain. I didn't want to go to college because there were too many drugs, too much alcohol."

In high school, Jillette got his driver's license as soon as he could because the Falcon was his ticket out of town. "To drive a car in rural America is freedom. Before I had a car, I'd never seen a rock and roll show, I'd never seen a comic or a show. I could drive to Boston; I saw the Mothers of Invention -- Frank Zappa, Bob Dylan."

Jillette's parents let him drive the Falcon throughout high school. "I was really surprised, because I'm from a slightly-lower-middle class family. It was amazing I had a car to drive as much as that," he reflects. "My parents realized that being able to get out of Greenfield was very, very important to me. All I wanted from the time I was a child was to live in New York City. So getting me a car at least got me to be able to drive to Boston."

First car bought

In the late 1970s, when he began collaborating with Teller, they needed a car for gigs and the two bought a Datsun B210 station wagon at a rental car auction.

"I did most all the driving. We had all our props in the back of the station wagon; that's when Teller and I had to be together every second," Jillette says.

Favorite road trip

Jillette spent 25 years on the road. "It may be one of the reasons I don't care at all about driving," he admits. "I was just trying to get from one gig to another. I love just driving across the country."

His favorite road trip was in the late 1980s, with good friend Eddie Gorodetsky, a co-executive producer on "Two and a Half Men" and former "Late Night with David Letterman" and "Saturday Night Live" writer. "He'd been a friend for a long time and for just arbitrary weird reasons, we drove all of Teller's furniture from Los Angeles to New York," Jillette says. Teller was moving to New York.

"I said if he just rented a truck, Eddie and I would fly from New York to L.A. and drive the truck across the country. Eddie at that time was a real New Yorker and didn't have a driver's license. So I drove while Eddie sat and rode. It was the last time I drove all the way across country. I was able to take a week to drive from L.A. to New York with the funniest man in the world. It was pretty great."

Automakers

Jillette is not happy about the bailouts. "I'm totally against the government controlling any industry at all," he says. "Things should be allowed to fail. I'm not for any sort of government intervention."

Penn and Teller

Season 7 of "Penn and Teller: Bullshit" returned to Showtime June 25, making it the longest-running series on the cable network. The first episode is devoted to orgasms, with all the requisite nudity and funny faces. The season promises to be as irreverent as ever.

"This season we're doing everything from orgasms to the Vatican," Jillette says. Two years ago, the show featured the Toyota Prius. "There was a lot of debunking of the Prius," he says. But there's another reason people drive it -- it's a chick magnet in Hollywood.

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"I've been told by friends in L.A. that if you want to f--- Hollywood starlets, you've got to have a Prius," Jillette states with authority. "Everybody I know that has a Prius, has it just to get laid because douchebag women in L.A. who can't read think a Prius is someone who's saving the world! It's like guys that used to go to peace marches to get laid. Now you have a Prius to get laid in."

Since that isn't an issue for Jillette these days, he's happy with his Mini Cooper. "It's actually a much more green car than a Prius, but it doesn't play that way," he says. "It's a much better deal than the Prius and it doesn't have the batteries that are going to be impossible to get rid of."