Why is an amoeba considered alive, but a car is not? The car is as complicated as the amoeba. It eats gasoline, and produces waste. It also has a reproductive system: by providing humans a useful service, cars have been able to use human factories as breeding grounds. When a car stops working, we say that it dies. Finally, if you look at cars through the decades, you can see that the primitive species of car (i.e. Model T) evolved into modern species (i.e. Prius). So why aren't cars alive?