Imagine living in a universe where, without even trying, you can run so fast that if you trip, you will die and splatter your body over a couple hundred meters of ground. And if you trip into someone, it’ll kill them and possibly an entire pile of people.
Like, in motor racing, the cars get wrecked but the drivers are fine. In the movie Cars, they all die. The race spectators are watching a blood sport.
I feel like they’re different orders of magnitude. Like it’s one thing to enjoy watching people do risky things, and it’s another to enjoy watching something where at least one person is going gruesomely die in front of you during the event.
Like… During the Bad Times of NASCAR, a few people would get seriously injured or die in a season, and it caused a huge commotion where they introduced new safety measures (eventually).
But cars were smashed and torn apart nearly every race.
It’s be like if in a typical game of football, there was greater than 50/50 odds that someone would get drawn, quartered, and disemboweled on the field during the match.
But that’s not really the part I was focused on, that was an afterthought.
The real focus was imagine if people jogged at such speeds that tripping would result in gruesome death. What would society even look like?
Well, the whole act of tripping would be entirely different. Cars don’t topple over like we do because they have a wider base. So stumbling on the curb isn’t going to kill you.
I don’t think much would change in day to day life. Cars can go fast, but they can also go quite slow. And cars travelling on the interstate would be going about the top speed of a cheetah, which is not an animal that generally falls over and cracks its skull while running. Plus, having your entire body be the car would definitely help you notice and prevent the hazards that would cause that.
Also if we take deleted scenes into account, there’s a scene where the townspeople of Radiator Springs transplant Lightning McQueen’s consciousness into a steamroller - so clearly their society is advanced enough medically for it not to be a problem, or the cars’ consciousness is a specific part that can be changed out.
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The only major change due to that specific factor I can think of would be people would probably try to commit suicide by running into walls, realistically.
Hmmm… You’re right that cars don’t crash as much as people trip. But they still crash a lot
And while if a cheetah trips while running it’s fine, if a car crashes at its top speed, it will completely come apart. Heck, if a car crashes at highway speed, it’s typically still absolutely destroyed, and highway speed is only gonna be like 1/2 or 1/3 its top speed, so that’s the equivalent of jogging.
A big part of this is the fragility of cars vs their speed.
That deleted scene is… It’s… Well that raises so many questions about their universe. I’m just gonna ignore that part lol.
Cars in Cars have also been shown to have complete control over their components, so I think crashes would be much more avoidable.
Other than that, I don’t have much. They would probably take a lot of measures to stop crashes, designing their societies completely differently from us. But they didn’t, because it’s Cars. At the end of the day, if you’re looking for sound world logic from Cars… I have bad news.
But trying to extrapolate from nonsense movies is the fun part!
Let me rephrase, I’m not trying to make the world of cars more realistic, I’m trying to imagine “what if we were as relatively fragile as cars are”. What if our normal every day activities like walking were as risky to us as driving is to a car.
So you’re asking “what if society has superpowers?”
Or specifically just super speed?
Specifically just speed, I suppose.
Not any of the other perception/durability powers that typically come with it.
And not crazy flash-like super speed, just the speed of a car.