Yes, but who stacked those cans?
What is strange about Cars is the way that its characters live in a world that implies humanity yet exists without humans. So the film's creators have to go through all sorts of contortions to make things work. Lightning has to press on a pedal to leave his trailer. Doc has to get on a hydraulic lift to hold court. Lightning has to talk to Mack on a special video screen. Yet who made the video screen? Machines and architecture all imply a means of design and construction. But there is nothing about a car—lacking both hands and mobility—that allows us to imagine how these things were created.
This problem is unique to Cars because in the other Pixar films the characters either live in the World (Toy Story, Bug's Life, Incredibles, Finding Nemo) or adjacent to the World (Monsters Inc.). Cars, on the other hand, takes place in an alternate universe in which the characters are fundamentally not at home; they live in a world they could have never made.
There's something grotesque about all of this. It's like falling in love with the look of plastic surgery in which the principal attraction lies in the fact that flesh has been manipulated. Cars asks us to accept a world without origin that exists only as image. This world does not derive from understanding or practice, but from a monstrous collage of fragments; manipulation pleasurable for its sheer novelty.
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