Paramount: John Lasseter's first directorial feature in 15 years - "Cosmic Motor" Billed as CARS In Space But Not Really ...

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"Cosmic Motors" - Thought-Controlled Driving Is Real.

"What Is Cosmic Motors?

Cosmic Motors is adapted from a 2007 concept-art book of the same name by German automotive futurist Daniel Simon, a former senior designer at Bugatti and Volkswagen who went on to design the reimagined Light Cycle for Tron: Legacy, vehicles for Prometheus and Oblivion, and warcraft for Captain America: The First Avenger. The book presents nine vehicles from a fictional galaxy called Galaxion, each with concept sketches, engineering rationale, and photorealistic renders. Upon release, it topped Amazon's automotive bestseller list.

The story's premise is lean but consequential: the Cosmic Motors company — CoMo to its devotees — was founded by the Redooa brothers, two entrepreneurs in the Galaxion system who converted decommissioned war machines into racing vehicles before expanding across every transportation category in the galaxy. What begins as a junkyard salvage operation becomes a civilization-scale technology transfer story."

So, while lazy people might describe as 'CARS in Space,' ... it's not really ... the most obvious, no eyes on cars ... it has human characters ... Turbo was closer to CARS ...

Lasseter's entire directing career has been shaped by his lifelong car obsession — he has driven a NASCAR pace car at Sonoma Raceway and has said he reads "every car magazine, every month." Cosmic Motors is the most natural creative fit of his post-Disney career: a vehicle-centric science fiction universe designed by a former Bugatti engineer, adapted for the screen by the director of Toy Story and Cars.

Daniel Simon's background is worth noting for what it reveals about Cosmic Motors' design DNA. Unlike most concept artists who work purely in speculation, Simon spent years at Volkswagen's advanced studio and at Bugatti before making the transition to entertainment design. His approach is explicitly physics-grounded: he works backward from plausible engineering principles to arrive at vehicles that feel physically coherent rather than merely imaginative. The Galaxion 3000 Coupé, for example, is rated at 1,840 horsepower and capable of 330 miles per hour (531 km/h) — speeds that require not aerodynamic magic but a power source with essentially unlimited energy density. Simon gave it one: a compact fusion reactor.

Compact Fusion Propulsion: How Close Is Real?

The Galaxion 3000's "Xenoranium Fusion Reactor CM980" is fictional shorthand for a compact nuclear fusion plant capable of delivering extraordinary specific power at vehicle scale. In the Galaxion universe, this is treated as a mature industrial technology — civilian racers have it because warships had it first, and CoMo converted the warships. In the real world in 2026, compact fusion propulsion is the subject of active, funded engineering programs, none of which have yet achieved net energy gain at vehicle scale — but the direction of travel is correct.

Lockheed Martin's Skunk Works division has filed patents for a Compact Fusion Reactor design, targeting aircraft-grade compactness at a fraction of the footprint of existing tokamak reactors. UK-based Pulsar Fusion is constructing an 8-meter (26-foot) wide fusion chamber targeting a test firing in 2027, pursuing plasma temperatures above 100 million degrees Celsius (180 million degrees Fahrenheit). The company's Direct Fusion Drive engine is designed to deliver both thrust and onboard electrical power simultaneously — the same dual-use architecture that Cosmic Motors' worldbuilding implies for its civilization's mobile fleet. Princeton Satellite Systems, collaborating with the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory on the Direct Fusion Drive concept, has been recognized in AIAA's Aerospace America 2025 Year in Review for advances in its compact fusion approach to power and propulsion.

Pulsar Fusion founder Richard Dinan has stated publicly that fusion beats conventional ion thrusters by 1,000 times in power output, and that fusion propulsion will be demonstrated in space decades before fusion achieves commercial energy generation on Earth. The engineering logic behind that claim maps precisely onto Simon's Galaxion worldbuilding: if a fusion system can power a warship, the energy abundance it provides cascades down to personal transport — which is exactly the CoMo origin story.

The physics detail Simon includes — the Galaxion 3000 reaching 330 mph (531 km/h) on an 1,840-horsepower fusion plant — is interesting as an engineering thought experiment. At those speeds, aerodynamic drag scales with the square of velocity, making power demand enormous. A fusion reactor's near-unlimited energy supply resolves this constraint completely: range and top speed become functions of aerodynamics and structural integrity, not fuel mass. This mirrors precisely what aerospace engineers conclude when modeling fusion propulsion for spacecraft — the benefit is not raw energy but the removal of propellant mass as the limiting variable.

It is also unlikely to be PG ... maybe PG-13? Definitely not CARS in Space ...