Watched the Pixar movie Cars with the kids last night. Well, watched the second half of it. No six-year-old could make it through all two hours in one sitting. No matter how nostalgic this hypothetical middle-aged six-year-old was for whitewall tires, Route 66, etc.

As you may recall, Cars takes place in a terrifying alternate America where cars have no drivers. In fact, the word “driver” doesn’t exist there. Their magazine Car & Driver is probably called Car & Word That Doesn’t Exist Here. Cars drive themselves, because the dominant species on this world has evolved–through some amazing coincidence–to look exactly like our automobiles, but with eyes for windshields and mouths on their bumpers. They even have the same make and model names as non-intelligent cars do in our world: Porsche, Chevrolet, etc. WHAT ARE THE ODDS?!?

So if these cars have brand names, I wondered…uh, who is branding them? Are there car factories in Cars world? (If so, America is probably a Third World country there, based on most of our recent automotive output.) Are the cars imbued with intelligence (and presumably consciousness) somewhere on the shadowy assembly line? And who or what is building them there? If that little slice of existential horror is too much for you, you are free to imagine that these cars are reproducing sexually somehow. Gah! Try scrubbing that image out of your brain now. (Also, wouldn’t their world be full of little Porsch-rolets, or are their miscegenation laws still in force?)

I wouldn’t bother asking, except that movie does its best to make its world specific and plausible: they have tractors where we have cows, tiny winged VW Beetles where we have insects, etc. But every little fillip raises more questions than it answers. Why, for example, are these cars keeping semi-intelligent living tractors sitting around in fields? Do they milk them? Slaughter and devour them annually? Or just use them as beasts of burden to plow and plant…what crop, exactly? Corn to make ethanol? They must have the least efficient economy ever.

Despite have no opposable thumbs–indeed, no limbs at all that aren’t covered by unwieldy inflated rubber rings–this freakish species has invented pretty much every comfort of life that we enjoy: TVs and telephones that look like ours, motels, air travel, Tony Shalhoub, etc. Tasks that require any degree of manual dexterity–changing a tire, for example–all seem to be performed by an army of mini-vehicles with spindly little arms. Wait, why are these little SmartCars the underclass? They should have revolted and taken over the world by now! I am SmartaCus! Or are they a separately evolved species in some kind of symbiotic relationship with their bumpered overlords? This movie is giving me a headache. But wait, that sexy car that sounds like Bonnie Hunt is sort of getting me going. Is that wrong?

(Next: why corporate closet-haunting by a society of monsters would IN NO WAY be a feasible business model, and ten problems I see with rats running a five-star French restaurant.)