I don’t watch movies all that frequently, but I do work with children in their home. Due to this, the movies I do end up seeing, I end up seeing a staggering number of times. Last year, I saw Cars 3 over thirty times over the span of two months (Also, a significant number of viewings of Cars 2. Yet only one viewing of the first Cars.) I work on promoting language development with my clients, so when they ask to rewind, I honor that request. The opening scene where Lightning McQueen gets in a horrible wreck is a favorite scene for a client, so I have seen that scene easily over one hundred times now. Sometimes when I close my eyes at night, I see phantom images of Lightning McQueen almost dying. So to not trigger stronger flashbacks, photos for this article will be from Cars 3 the video game.

In the film, McQueen is becoming outclassed by a new class of racer, and ends up training his new trainer to become a competent racer herself. It’s a story of McQueen learning to pass the torch onto a new generation of racer and become a mentor figure. The plot is what I absorbed on my first viewing. I had many more viewings to absorb other things. Most of my viewings were latching onto the minutiae of the world of Cars. I present some of my biggest findings and questions:

The cars make mention of arthritis, which implies they have a skeletal structure, yet underneath their hoods are car engines. They have eyes, teeth and tongues. Leaking oil is analogous to urinating yourself, but many cars state they do not leak oil because they are kept in top shape. Despite this, there are public bathrooms available for the cars, including bidets.

Some senior cars we meet in the film make mention they use to run moonshine, which means there was an alcohol prohibition, that they are capable of ingesting alcohol, and possess the bloodstream (oilstream?) to become inebriated. Given the age of the cars, and the fact that this series takes place in the United States, this was likely the 1920 Alcohol Prohibition. That prohibition was preceded by the Wartime Prohibition Act, originally intended to save grain during World War I. Ergo, even in a world of only automobiles, the world has seen the horrors of modern warfare.

There’s a school bus who mentions a local school district. The school bus is not sized appropriately to transport child sized cars inside of it, so what does the school bus do? The school bus battles in demolition derbies. Did it fall into this life because a traditional car based school district has no use for a school bus designed to transport human children? How do child cars turn into adults? Do their chassis bend and contort as they enter adolescence?

Two cars of different makes and models are stated to be brothers. What is family in this world? Does a mother car give birth to a child, or is everyone’s mother a factory? What factory would produce different car brands simultaneously? One must assume that this brotherhood these cars share is one of found family.

A car driving on the beach comes to a halt because they were afraid to run over some crabs. There are no pigeons in this universe, but there are crabs. Carcinisation is a strong enough force to evolve crabs even in this universe. We do not see said crabs, so I am unsure if they are actually crabs, or small car like entities merely called crabs. Cars need gasoline, but they are also depicted eating sushi. Are fish organic or mechanical? If they are mechanical, what factories bring the fish into existence? Bugs are confirmed to exist, but the analog to cows are tractors. I don’t think there are any organic megafauna in this world, but there appear to be smaller organisms to sate the car’s hunger.

There used to be animals and more abundant plant life however. The cars run on fossil fuels, and are even shown operating oil rigs out in the ocean, so the ancient world must have had organic life so that the oil that sustains the cars of the modern world exists. Who filled the tank of the first car then? The ability to refine gasoline must have existed before cars came into this world, but the history of Cars as the dominant “life” form on the planet stretches further back than the existence of the internal combustion engine.

There is a car pope, who is head of the Catholic church. He rides around in the popemobile, who is a separate car. I am not a religious scholar so I cannot speak enitrely to the can of worms that this opens up, but I can certainly wonder. We are never shown any religious texts or art, but the question of who biblical figures are is compelling. Was there Jesus Christ, the man, or Jesus Chrysler, the car?

One of the Mexican cars hails from the village of Santa Cecilia, which is the setting of Pixar’s Coco. While obviously intended as a fun easter egg, I must dive into the other implications of this. The Spanish colonized Mexico, and like the existence of Jesus, we are left to wonder whether this colonization was an effort of man or machines. With all of my exposure to the Cars universe, I believe the earliest time period we are shown is the 1920s, and we see Cars as the dominant life form in that period. It is possible that there was a transition from man to machine, but I believe the very earth itself indicates that the world has always been Cars.

There exist multiple rock formations and hills in the shape of car parts. Whatever forces resulted in a world dominated by cars also formed one where the earth itself is shaped into cars. I fully believe it is Cars all the way down. An entire world and history parallel to ours, only with Cars at the helm of innovation, progress, destruction and exploitation of the natural world.

Thankfully, my clients are now watching other films, so that my mind may rest. Still, I believe I have been altered. My mind and the myriad mysteries of the world of Cars are now inextricably intertwined, like two June bugs on a summer night. When people share some of their favorite movie experiences, and I want to share some of my strongest memories, what mostly bubbles up now, are thoughts about Cars. I have to ramble on about these things, and lay my hand on the horn to alert everyone to how strange these movies are, but there is no horn. I am a man, not a machine. I have no horn, and I must honk.