The Anatomy of Pixar's Cars

Now that we've hit one million views, it's time. I'm officially collecting input for a "The Universe of Pixar's Cars" video. Toss your theories and observations about the potential implications of the Cars' world (religion, culture, history, society) into this thread! Edit: Yes I will watch Planes.

Perhaps not comparing them with humans as a living biological thing , but instead seeing them as their own kind and species is the best option

This was disturbing. Good video. Pixar needs to answer for their crimes of sentient cars not making biological sense.

The locking doors thing could be that cars sometimes need to open their doors to allow doctor cars to perform surgery. Which has some horrific implications that the cars locked themselves as if they thought Lightning was gonna steal their organs.

This makes SO MUCH SENSE- you know the theory that everything evolves into crabs? Cars are just humans post carcinization....

I love the hermit crab theory. A race who became so reliant on machines that their bodies evolved to be reliant entirely on cybernetics to move around or do basically anything.

Okay new rule: Finn McMissile is essentially inspector gadget. All his gadgets are built into his limbs. He is a cyborg in the car's universe.

The "Sally is a foot girl" part had me howling, this video is insane and I love that you made it

5:50 cars in real life needs oxygen for the engine, it helps to even out the combustion of air and fuel mixture. If water travels into the air intake system and to the cylinders, it can waterlock the engine (seize). In automotive terminology , we refer it as "hydrolocking" Oxygen sensors is crucial for timing the combustion of the engine. They are located in the exhaust system where they sit next to the catalytic converter (typically 2 sensors after and before the catalytic converter) its purpose is to send data to the ECM (Engine control module), it helps the ecm to perfectly calibrate the timing on sending fuel or air to the engine cylinders. (Basically it helps to maximize fuel economy and overall performance)

The window vent is a feature on real race cars, it basically circulates air in the cockpit

Pixar gave us a mess and said: "Figure this out." And I feel like this explaination works best, honestly

The way deeper she reads about the cars, the more terrified her voice gets 😭😭

25:15 Soul-Mater opening his door to get back into himself is the equivalent of opening your cranium on a lachet and hopping into your skull 😂

Something I don’t often see people mentioning when it comes to male vs female cars in this universe is the "eyelashes". It seems to be the only noticeable difference, but it is CONSISTENT. Female cars have dark edges to their upper eyelids, almost like mascara. And I can't think of one that doesn't. I think that's the distinction, aside from what may be different where we CAN'T see it. The 'mascara' is how other cars know if they're talking to a male or a female.

It's much better to think of cars as cyborgs - most of their parts are mechanical and replacable, but they still have some biological parts.

Your video just makes me realize that you're giving more creativity and questions about the Cars universe than the actual writers.

This entire video self-inflicted psychic damage, and is exactly what I was hoping for when I clicked

A little thing I wanna say about the respirator. A car's engine also needs Air to work so it isn't that weird to put a resperator on a car. People put snorkles on their intake.

Hihi. Car guy here! I got too invested in this. 2:30 Real car thing. It's a window duct. Race cars can have multiple of these. Each one is hooked to a flexible fabric hose that can be used to cool off the driver, electrical systems, heat exchangers, or other things that get hot during operation. The human equivalent would be sweat pores. They're used for temperature regulation 5:50 I'm going to heavily simplify this :D During the combustion cycle there are 4 steps: suck, squeeze, bang, blow. Basic single cylinder engine: you have a cylinder with two valves, a spray bottle nozzle, and a lighter on the outside of it all poking through the top, inward. Inside is a slightly smaller cylinder of it that can slide up and down which is connected to a metal stick below it that can go up and down. The left valve opens, the inner cylinder drops, and it sucks air in as it creates a vacuum like a syringe. The spray bottle also sprays a mist of gas at the same time. The valve closes, the spray stops, and the inner cylinder goes up, squeezing the mixture really really tight. The lighter sparks, igniting the mixture creating a bang, pushing the inner cylinder back down. The right valve then opens up and momentum carries the inner cylinder back up, blowing the exhaust gas out of the outer cylinder. The reason the car would breathe oxygen is your car can't run on gasoline alone. It needs air. Secondly, water doesn't compress. If your car breathes in water as the suck valve opens, the engine is going to stop during the squeeze part as the outer cylinder is now FULL of water. Remember that stick that I said is attached to the inner cylinder? That will bend when this happens. It's the car's equivalent of inhaling water and having a heart attack in a fraction of a second. Horrible way to die :D As for the O2 sensor joke, I giggled. XD I don't know if regular water by itself can foul those, but they are sensitive pieces of equipment and salt water absolutely will ruin them. 6:10 this is also a legit issue that happens with real cars. Oxygen starvation! If a car's computer is trying to hit a target power output, and it needs a certain amount of oxygen and fuel to make it possible, it could falter not having enough oxygen. Easiest fix is a wider bore air intake and a high flow air filter. 6:49 I like how they acknowledge that a car's alternator can keep an engine running and electronics working so long as you don't put it under too much load. Disconnecting the battery during running is strongly not advised with modern cars, but an older car like Luigi and Mater can handle the irregular voltage. 7:53 "Walking on their rims" as the van in this scene has their wheels and tires on the blet and is walking on their wheel hub assemblies (my wallet hurts seeing that). 8:51 The front wing isn't a bumper. It's a dummy expensive aerodynamic bit of carbon fiber. You ain't bumping anything with that. lol 13:26 Theory 2 is the winner. In the irl car community, you have headlights, but make the headlights pop-up headlights and suddenly you activate the neurons of every car guy in a 10 mile radius. Don't ask me why but pop up headlights are * chef kiss * minifique! Going even further, the Twins are Mazda Miatas. Specifically the NA models. The proceeding models are the NB, NC, and ND. Some people like to perform what is called a "face swap" where they take the NA front off the car and put the NB front on with its flush mount headlights like every other car, which is wrong, sacrilegious, and a crime. 15:21 Exposed suspension components. The human equivalent would be an exceptionally fit man who is comfortable being shorts and a tank top. Think stereotypical-male-lifeguard. 17:11 Hearing a sniffer test be called a colonoscopy gives this scene an entirely new horrible meaning. 18:55 The Rust Belt would kill for car bidets. Some car washes up here now have undercarriage sprayers built into touchless wash stations. Road salt in the winter is no joke. I have one of those yard water sprayers that create a fan of water that waves back and forth that I slip under my suspension a few times during the winter to rinse all the road salt off. 20:14 Yup. You got it. License plate just says what the car is, who owns it, where it belongs, and if it's road legal. VIN number however tells you EVERYTHING. The car's components bumper to bumper, where it was built, everywhere it's been registered, who all has owned it, what it was used for, all of its service records, how many wrecks it has been involved in- everything. 20:54 Grey sweatpants era. Mcqueen is done up in primer paint. 21:55 To answer your question here, yes the modifications can more than likely be undone. A lot of land speed cars are purpose built using existing platforms or guts. Tieing back to all the context of building a car, open engine surgery, and so on, i have a running headcannon that if you were to do like Superfast Matt did and take the guts out of a Honda and put it in a land speed car that is half the width and twice the length of a refrigerator, it is still that same Honda, just in a different body. 23:08 To be honest, you have to be at least a little unhinged to be a part of the lemons community. Still, the 24 Hours of Lemons is one of the most entertaining irl races out there. The uber-downforce-Miata still blows me away at how it DESTROYED the competition two years in a row. 24:22 You can put a car into a wall as many times as you want, you can blow up as many engines as you like, you can have as many parts fail over time, but if the unibody or the frame gets broken, it's a write-off. I'm not too sure how this would translate over into the cars universe as open-engine surgery is about as casual as blinking. Maybe windowing the block or spinning a rod bearing would do you in? The frame/unibody rotting through would be the equivalent of your back breaking and your spinal cord getting severed as your wire harness gets stripped out of its sockets. That'd be the only sure-fire way to kill a car. 25:41 It's common practice to start a small fire under exploration trucks in sub-zero climates to warm up the engine bay and differentials. Oil nor diesel are combustible unless subjected to stupidly high levels of heat. McQueen's paint would ripple and bubble long before his internal organs have any chance of catching fire. 25:47 Partially for comedic effect, but if you have a car indoors that isn't moving and running (dyno tests for example) you want a blower fan on them to get clean air blowing over top of the radiator so the radiator fans don't need to work as hard. Sally, however, is rear-engine, and this doesn't apply to her. 26:41 I just pretend they consume distilled water for cooling instead of antifreeze. it's a fine substitute for countries that don't see freezing temperatures, and coolant does burn off over time. Following up with that, if it's implied the elevator is full of blood, and blood is coolant, then does that mean water is also... blood? You're making me do a heckin' think and I don't like this. 33:35 The joke is multi-tiered. Part one is Pixar finally making a car the way the audience has been asking them to for years, and the second part is the French make weird-ass cars that don't conform to current styles or standards. Ever see a Renault Avantime? The Twizy? How about a Citroen DS steering wheel? That's the level of odd they've perfected. I LOVE the hermit crab theory though as it ties in perfectly with the shell-swapping theory, aging, and upgrading as you brought up earlier. It would also give a definitive way for them to die, as in the fleshy bits give up on life before the mechanical components do. Oh MAN, this was a fun thing to hyperfix on for the past two hours!

That's a really good/disturbing explanation. If they are truly hermit crabs, why would they need trailers? It'd be like wearing two layers of clothes but you can't move in one. As a car guy, cars need oxygen to run their engines at all. The cooling duct on the side is present on many sports/race cars; either for cooling of the car's engine or for the driver/crab inside. (See the Lamborghini Aventador for an example) Fans are used to keep a race car's hot engine from seizing after hard use. Heaters (fire) would be used to warm up a car's components before engine startup from cold. French cars are/have been seen as unorthodox or strange. See the Citroen Ami, Renault Twizy, Citroen CX (it was actually asymmetric), Peugeot 205 T16. The French have always had the balls to try new things and their cars are often looked at as curios. This may explain the strange French car; it's a failed innovation, despite the fact that the car itself (Panhard Dyna 24CT or an Alfa Duetto Spider) is not at all innovative, and if it's an Alfa, not even French. I think that the reason there are two ways to put oil/petrol into the cars is that the mouth is for the driver; the gas tank is for the engine. This would mean that the engine and driver would be separate entities, which makes more sense as to why the cars are in the cabin and not in the engine compartment. This makes the frequent engine tune-ups and Mater's exposed engine much more logical and less disturbing. Another thing is there are multiple kinds of oil; motor oil/engine oil, vegetable oil, petroleum oil, etc. Maybe the edible oil is required diet for the cars? The weird Alfa/Panhard car may not have an engine at all. They may be either unable to move, have an engine someplace else, or the entity inside physically turns the wheels with muscles. The "engine someplace else" idea may not work, as Sally does not use headlights as lights. The other possibility is that the car was one (partially developed) half of a pair of conjoined twins, the larger of whom sat in the cabin and the smaller in front of the engine, and the larger one bit the dust first. A thing that no one so far has pointed out is that all cars are four wheel drive and four wheel steer but primarily use the fronts. This may be similar to how we have four usable limbs but prefer to grasp things (suspension arms) with our two front limbs (hands). On the topic of gender and reproduction, I think the entities exit the cars at least partially to reproduce. This means that baby entities must reside somewhere in the car until a new body can be discovered. (Maybe the Alfa/Panhard is a child that inhabited its parent's vehicle after it died prematurely and, as the engine was in the way, may not have been able to get access to the cabin, and eventually outgrew the small opening it could exit from.) The cars' bodies may be old cars used by humans (the Alfa has a full interior), or they may be synthetically created (the VW Bugs may be insects inside of die-cast model cars, or simply mimic their surroundings and hide amongst the die cast cars). In case you can't tell, I came up with half of this while writing. Wow that was a brain dump.