The show car, which has toured concours and car shows for years in paint schemes resembling those featured in the first two movies, is the only one at Pixar’s stand on the auto show’s main floor. It’s hardly the first time the Detroit show has displayed an imaginary creation that you’ll never encounter in traffic, but in the show’s opening press conference, Pixar Animation Studios chief creative officer John Lasseter did call his creation “the first autonomous car; he drives himself.” (Although Herbie the Love Bug might object to that characterization.)
Lasseter noted that research for the original Cars movie started at the Detroit show in 2001 and that the promotional work for the completed film really kicked off at the same auto show in 2006, the year it was released. Eleven years later, in Cars 3, the Lightning McQueen character has evolved from hotshot rookie to seasoned racing veteran struggling to fend off a pack of young challengers led by a new character, Jackson Storm. As the trailer (below) makes clear, Lightning is involved in a major crash and spends more time in the fictional Route 66 town of Radiator Springs (which is the setting re-created at Cars Land in the Disney California Adventure theme park in Anaheim) than he did in the globetrotting Cars 2. Route 99 in California is another setting that gets prominent play in the new film.
Cars production designer Jay Shuster and creative director Jay Ward explained how they designed the new characters of Jackson Storm and Cruz Ramirez, the latter a driving coach who helps McQueen get his mojo back. The process emulates that used by real-world car designers, with ink-on-paper sketches and clay modeling before the application of Pixar’s advanced digital-illustration technologies. Ward and Shuster were joined in the early stages of this process by retired Ford design chief J Mays (so many Jays!).
You can see the original article here!
