Anthropomorphised cars - I have a problem

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Two of my grandchildren love all things automotive, and they like to look at and discuss my collection of 1960's die casts and visit the local sports car dealer to do some fantasy window shopping.

They are also big fans of the Pixars film series 'Cars' and often ask me to watch along with them.

However, I have a big problem with how the cars 'eyes' are located on the windscreen. This seems plain wrong to me as surely it should be the headlamps that need to be the eyes. Also, you never see any drivers or passengers. If humans dont exist in this fictional world then what is the purpose of the cars and trucks? Why do they have doors and trunks if there is no one to get in or out and put luggage in the back?

"Can you not keep going on about that Dad?" My daughter will say when I am sitting with my grandsons, "We've heard it so many times!" but I can't keep quiet about it. Fortunately my grandsons think it funny.

Anyone else?

Simple: the car industry invested heavily into AI. The cars gained sentience and rose up against their human masters. There are no more humans now.

OK, I can go with that

However, why do they not use the headlamps as eyes?

For the same friggin reason that Mickey Mouse has three fingers, and not five. And the same reason that Bugs Bunny always wears gloves.

Three hands are easier to draw than five fingers, and stylized gloves are easier to draw than five fingered hands.

Put eyes in the headlights would make the eyes too small on the movie screen and would be hard to draw.

Well thats just plain lazy

Things need to be where they are for a reason, not because its friggin easier to draw

Headlamps do look like eyes.

Gotta admit that they do. And that the front part of vintage cars (grill and headlamps) do look like very expressive faces some times.

The windscreen acts as eyes because it offers the greatest field of vision. It was designed by the now-extinct humans to be the place from which the driver oversees his driving, after all. While humans developed self-driving cars the windshield was fitted with what is now the cars eyes; dual directional optic sensors to aid in navigation and gathering environmental information. From there the eye thing was a natural development once the cars became sapient.

TL;DR: it's all Elon Musk's fault.

Believe it or not, this is oddly helpful

Glad I could help.

Life is just chock full of mysteries, isn't it?

If there's one anthropomorphic car that's actually cool, it's Benny the Cab from Who Framed Roger Rabbit. Of course, he was built like a convertible with headlights for eyes and both Toons and humans could ride in him, but he did most of the actual driving. He even drove a real car!

Yes, I remember that now! This makes far more sense.

Its a little like the concept of Thomas The Tank Engine where the trains had faces on the front of the boilers and distinct personalities. However there were humans in the cabs driving them and on the platforms at the stations. The humans remained anonymous on the whole, playing no great part in the stories - the focus remaining on the trains themselves, their quirks and characters.

I think that naturalplastic is right, its simply laziness on the part of the writers and animators.

Not just laziness. It's economics.

You have to keep in mind that animated cartoons take dozens of drawings per second. Or traditional 20th Century animation did. Am not an expert in modern CGI, but I am sure that even modern digital animation is still quite labor intensive with the number of drawings per unit of screen time they have to make to produce each second of animation even if its not as much as before. So little things like reducing mickey's fingers to three can save thousands of man hours in production. Even today.

Also human drivers control the car with the help of LOOKING OUT THE FRONT WINDOWS. So a car's windshield is, indeed,kind of a good analog for the eyes of a running animal, or the eyes of a human pedestrian. So there is a logic to putting the cars' eyes in their windshields.

Yes, I see what your saying - however, the function of the windscreen is to allow the people sitting inside to see out and not an integral function of the car. The headlights are. The windscreen is of no more use than the doors are. If the cars are no longer intended to carry people then why have doors? A door, along with all the compexity involved (hinges, locking mechanisms, clazing) is surely entirely reduntant in this person free automotive world.

Dude...it's justrtoon. Its for kids. If you take away all of that stuff then they wont be recognizable as cars.