The reason? Because "Cars" director John Lasseter "gets" Route 66 and its allure.
Here's an excerpt from a New York Times story that illustrates this:
As for the town of Radiator Springs, the quirky desert hamlet on Route 66, it provides a reminder of the less homogenized America Mr. Lasseter saw as a boy.
"For a lot of our vacations, my brother and sister and I would pile into the station wagon, and our parents would drive Route 66 from L.A.," he recalled. "When they started building the Interstate, my dad would drive it for parts of our journeys and say, 'Now we can really make time.' But the Interstate was so smooth, you'd lose track of where you were. When you drove Route 66, you really felt the land. You knew where it was hilly and where it was flat. On the Interstate it was all flat."
The melancholy images of the forgotten town balance the fast-paced racing scenes and broad comic sequences. Mr. Lasseter says his use of these moments was inspired by the films of Hayao Miyazaki, the Japanese animation director.
"In every one," he said, "there are beautiful quiet scenes. The drive in our early films was to trim out all the 'dead spots,' because the executives were always saying: 'I'm going for popcorn.' 'You're losing me.' After a while I realized I wasn't going to lose the audience. The executives were used to seeing the movie, but the audience wouldn't be. They'd be with us in those moments."