The Cars Creative Director Has A Morbid Theory On How The Cars Came To Be

The Cars 3 trailer may have finally brightened your view of the franchise after that shockingly depressing teaser, but don't put away the tissues just yet. The creative director of the Cars universe, Jay Ward, was recently asked about the franchise's history, and some of his ideas are pretty morbid.

Ward was asked by Screen Crush at a recent press junket about one of the more pressing questions in the Cars universe: how did the autonomous automobiles come to be? With no humans in sight but signs of former human life all over, the question has led some Pixar fans to theorize that the film takes place at some point after human civilization has been wiped out. Ward's idea is a big more... violent.

"If you think about this, we have autonomous car technology coming in right now," Ward said, adding that his views are just his ideas, not Pixar's official stance. "It's getting to the point where you can sit back in the car and it drives itself. Imagine in the near-future when the cars keep getting smarter and smarter and after one day they just go, 'Why do we need human beings anymore? They're just slowing us down. It's just extra weight, let's get rid of them.' But the car takes on the personality of the last person who drove it. Whoa. There you go."

That wasn't Ward's only idea for how the humans were wiped away, though. He also suggested that it could have been a meteor, saying that Cars 3 production designer Jay Shuster did a "great" drawing of the asteroid wiping out the human race. "All the humans are gone and all of a sudden the cars start rising up and moving around," he says.

Whether or not Ward's ideas are correct, we're going to try very hard to avoid thinking about them while we enjoy what appears to be a delightful, family-friendly, non-death related film in Cars 3, due out on June 16. While you try to mentally get past the idea that cars are going to wipe us out and take over our world, distract yourself by seeing some of the other blockbusters you can look forward to this summer.