Sir Miles Axlerod

"He's a little excited, isn't he?"

- Miles Axlerod

Sir Miles Axlerod is the hidden true main antagonist of Cars 2. He is voiced by Eddie Izzard.

Personality
Charming as he seems, Miles is a villain. He is evil, greedy, deceptive and manipulative. Miles is also clearly a smart thinker, as he had thought the entire plan to get rid of Allinol through, as he set everything up to make him look like an innocent car. At the end, he was proven to be the villain.

Cars 2
"Axlerod is a former oil baron who has sold off his fortune, converted himself into an electric vehicle and has devoted his life to finding the renewable, clean-burning energy source of the future—ultimately discovering what he believes is the fuel everyone should be using. Axlerod is also the car behind the World Grand Prix, a three-country race he created that attracts the world’s top athletes—but it’s really an excuse to show off his new wonder-fuel, Allinol."

Though at first Professor Zündapp appears to be the main villain, it is revealed near the end of the film by Mater that Axlerod is actually the villain. His supposed "alternative fuel" was actually gasoline engineered to expand and eventually explode if hit with an electromagnetic pulse, and was part of a plot to turn the world against alternative energy and have them rely on gasoline, bringing profits to the lemons and himself due to the fact that they own the largest untapped oil reserves in the world. At a party promoting the World Grand Prix, he leaked oil on the floor, proving that he wasn't an electric car; he blamed it on Mater.

Eventually, Axlerod arranges for Zündapp and the lemon cars to plant a bomb on Mater's air filter as a backup plan to kill Lightning McQueen. Mater later discovers the story about the conspiracy after helping Finn McMissile and Holley Shiftwell arrest Zündapp and the lemon cars, and confronts Axlerod for it, and his suspicions are confirmed when he forces Axlerod into deactivating the bomb with a voice command in order to keep the bomb from killing himself since he would have been caught in the blast. To proceed further, Mater opens Axlerod's hood, revealing the same engine (a Rover V8) as the unseen mastermind depicted in the photo, which Finn and Holley obtained from their American counterpart earlier, proving to be a perfect match. It is not told what happened to Axlerod after having his plot exposed. But it can be implied that in the end of the movie, he gets arrested on the charges of conspiracy to commit crime, murder and embezzlement, since he is last seen being surrounded by several police cars and sent to jail with Zündapp and the other lemons for good.

Trivia

 * His design resembles an extremely modified version of a Range Rover L322.
 * His license plate is ALT NRG, an abbreviation of "alternative energy." However, before his "electric conversion" (ultimately a lie), he does not appear to have a license plate at all.
 * Axlerod's tires' texture repeats a leaf-shaped motif.
 * If you look closely at his front wheels, you can see the words "REGEN R8," meaning "Regenerate."
 * Miles uses a lot of parts made by "British Wheeland" to keep himself going. "British Wheeland" is a parody of British Leyland, which produced both the Range Rover and the notoriously unstable V-8 engine that powered them. Even the logo was a parody of British Leyland's, using a big bold printed W instead of the big bold printed L. Mater states truthfully that B.L. made parts that won't fit on other cars because of them not using standardized bolts.
 * The jungle Axlerod gets lost in before he converts to an electric vehicle is the jungle from Up.
 * The DVD commentary for Cars 2 states that the climax where Mater confronts Axlerod at Buckingham Palace over the plot to sabotage the World Grand Prix came rather early in production, so the Pixar team went backwards from there to make Axlerod the ultimate good guy and someone else the bad guy, so that when it got up to the climax, everyone could see how brilliant Mater was in figuring out the whole thing.
 * Before coming up with Axlerod, Pixar had considered a Russian super car as the main villain.
 * Axlerod's name apparently originated from an old joke his voice actor Eddie Izzard actually once told concerning the invention of the wheel and axle.
 * Axlerod's voice actor also played Nigel the koala from The Wild.
 * Along with Grem, Acer, Professor Z and Victor Hugo, Axlerod is playable in Cars 2: The Video Game, even though they are villains. However, it could be that the tracks are actually part of the simulation, so it's possible that they are part of it as well.
 * Axelrod's personality is very similar to that of Waternoose (one of the main antagonists from Monsters, Inc.; released 10 years before): both are portrayed as evil businessmen who are originally introduced as being friendly, both rely on deception as part of their motivations, and both are ultimately defeated by being exposed by the heroes as villains and being subsequently arrested.
 * Although Axlerod didn't reveal his true colors until the end, he is the true main antagonist of the film because he was actually Professor Z's boss and had bigger plans than he did(since Axlerod is the one who created the World Grand Prix and its sponsored fuel Allinol to initiate the plot and set the story rolling).
 * Axlerod is the most unique main Pixar movie villain because he.
 * Despite being the boss of the Lemons, Axlerod had no interaction with them onscreen, not counting during his live feed with them when his identity was concealed.

Quotes

 * "Deactivate!"
 * "How did the tow truck figure it out?" (Axlerod's last words)