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The Cars were an American rock band formed in Boston in 1976. Emerging from the new wave scene in the late 1970s, they consisted of Ric Ocasek (rhythm guitar), Benjamin Orr (bass guitar), Elliot Easton (lead guitar), Greg Hawkes (keyboards) and David Robinson (drums). Ocasek and Orr shared lead vocals. Ocasek was the band's leader and took sole songwriting credits for practically every song, leading to friction in the band later.

The Cars were at the forefront of the merger of 1970s guitar-oriented rock with the new synthesizer-oriented pop that became popular in the early 1980s. Music critic Robert Palmer of The New York Times and Rolling Stone wrote that the band "...have taken some important but disparate contemporary trends—punk minimalism, the labyrinthine synthesizer and guitar textures of art rock, the '50s rockabilly revival and the melodious terseness of power pop—and mixed them into a personal and appealing blend".

In 1978, the Cars were named "Best New Artist" in a readers' poll conducted by Rolling Stone. The band's 1978 debut album, The Cars, sold six million copies and appeared on the Billboard 200 album chart for 139 weeks. The Cars had four Top 10 hits: "Shake It Up" (1981), "You Might Think" (1984), "Drive" (1984), and "Tonight She Comes" (1985). The band won Video of the Year for "You Might Think" at the first MTV Video Music Awards in 1984.

The Cars disbanded in 1988. During this first hiatus, Orr died of pancreatic cancer in 2000. In 2007, Easton and Hawkes joined Todd Rundgren and others to form the offshoot band the New Cars. The surviving original members of the Cars reunited to record the band's seventh and final album, Move Like This (2011), toured in support of the album, and once again went on hiatus. In April 2018, the Cars were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and the band reunited to perform at the induction ceremony. This became the band's final performance before Ocasek's death the following year.

History

Early years

Before forming the Cars, the band's members performed together in several groups. Ric Ocasek and Benjamin Orr met in Cleveland, Ohio, in the 1960s after Ocasek saw Orr performing with his band, the Grasshoppers, on The Big 5 Show, a local musical variety program. The two were members of various bands in Columbus, Ohio, and Ann Arbor, Michigan, before moving to Boston in the early 1970s. In Boston, Ocasek and Orr, along with lead guitarist Jas Goodkind, formed a Crosby, Stills and Nash–style folk rock band called Milkwood. In 1972, they released an album titled How's the Weather through Paramount Records that failed to chart.

After this, Milkwood, Ocasek and Orr formed the group Richard and the Rabbits, a name suggested by Jonathan Richman. The band included Greg Hawkes, who had studied at the Berklee School of Music and had played saxophone on Milkwood's album. Hawkes left to tour with Martin Mull and His Fabulous Furniture, a musical comedy act in which Mull played a variety of instruments. Ocasek and Orr then performed as an acoustic duo called Ocasek and Orr at the Idler Coffeehouse in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Some of the songs they played became early Cars songs.