This Deleted Scene From Pixar’s ‘Cars’ Raises All Kinds Of Unsettling Questions

It’s no secret that I have been obsessed with Pixar’s Cars universe for quite some time now. It’s not just that it’s about anthropomorphic cars, or that those cars have their eyes in the wrong place, or that many elements in the Cars universe make no sense, or at least hint at a disturbing truth, a truth that suggests the wholesale destruction – or at least a significant transformation – of humanity itself. I even took these unsettling ideas to the people behind the Cars franchise itself, at Pixar, and I still don’t feel like this, any of this, is really over. Especially when I keep encountering new bits of Cars mythos that demands scrutiny, like what I want to talk about today.

The thing I want to discuss today is a bit different than my other Cars-related discussions, because it’s a deleted scene, and, as such, isn’t really canon. Still, the questions it inspires are fascinating, and absolutely worth you wasting lots and lots of brainpower considering all the implications instead of, you know, doing your job or paying attention to your family or whatever.

I think before we go into this, a quick refresher about my over-arching Cars universe theory may be in order:

Homunculus Theory

The theory I have arrived at to explain what may be happening in the Cars universe, the theory that explains why they use human languages and have windows and doors and school buses and mattresses is what I call the Homunculus Theory, and it essentially suggests that humanity has evolved into a sort of hybrid cybernetic organism with automobiles, merging the bodies of car and human into an unholy union:

In this theory, the near-vestigial human body is placed within a specially-designed automobile that becomes the human’s permanent carapace, a new physical body through which the human can perceive and interact with the world. There must be some sort of combined breeding/gestating/manufacturing facilities in the Cars universe that produce these combined human-automotive beings.

Now, I bring this up because this deleted scene, had it been actually in the movie, would have negated my Homunculus Theory, which, again, suggests that the consciousness/soul/mind of the cars is, in fact, some sort of vestigial human. In this deleted scene, the concept of where a car’s consciousness/mind/soul/ka/whatever is stored is addressed, with fairly horrific implications. Just watch:

Okay, so this looks to be an animatic from when the movie was first being written and planned out. You can see another example of an animatic from Cars 2 here in this official Pixar video:

These crude sketches/animations are often done to get the story and pacing cinematography defined before everything is actually modeled and rendered, which, of course, takes a significant amount of effort. Because this scene only exists as an animatic, that means this was likely cut pretty early into the moviemaking process.

Okay, let’s go over what is happening here, and I’m assuming some degree of familiarity with the basic plotline of the original 2006 Cars movie: this takes place after Lightning McQueen was arrested for accidentally destroying the main road through the town of Radiator Springs. In the finished movie, Lightning McQueen is sentenced to repair the road, and accomplishes the task by towing a large, sloppy, tar-spreading road-resurfacing trailer:

In the deleted scene, though, McQueen is sentenced to do the job by having his engine unwillingly transplanted into a steamroller. Doing so appears to transfer all of McQueen’s personality and mind and identity into that steamroller, suggesting that in this vision of the Cars universe, a car’s engine is the seat of the soul.

Now, there’s a whole lot of issues brought up here, not the least of which is what sort of society would allow a highly invasive medical/mechanical procedure like that to take place on an unaware subject? Even if McQueen was guilty of damaging the road, is this really a punishment that fits the crime? McQueen reacts with the same sort of horror you or I might if we were arrested for being drunk and disorderly, and then awoke to find our brain had been transplanted into, say, a hippo.

Then, Mater has his engine transplanted into McQueen’s race car body, and effectively takes over his identity and life. Clearly, none of this is ethical.

And, the deleted scene seems to acknowledge this, because it sets all that up as a dream sequence.

So, okay, maybe communities wouldn’t be so cruel as to transplant one’s consciousness into another body without permission, but that still doesn’t change the idea that, in this conception of the Cars universe, the engine carries the essence of a given car’s identity.

So, does that mean engine swaps don’t exist the same way in this world? In our world, for example, people have put Porsche 356 engines in VW Beetles; would doing so in this version of Cars be something Franlkenstinean, putting a brain into a dead body?

What happens when an engine gets re-built? Is it the same soul even if, say, all of the pistons and crankshaft and valvetrain are changed out? Is this a sort of Ship of Theseus problem, where we are forced to wonder how many parts on an engine can be changed before the personality and soul are no longer the same?

Is it just the engine block? Is that the seat of all identity? If you’re a sentient car, and you get a cracked engine block, are you just doomed? Could you even get replacement engine blocks, and if you did replace your own, would you still be you afterwards?

Personally, I’m glad this scene was cut; it brings up too many macabre possibilities that I think would have distracted from the film itself, and, more importantly, it’s incompatible with my beloved Homunculus Theory. And we can’t have that.

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