Cars 2 was also sorta a passion project for Lasseter. He really wanted it to get made anyway. The toy sales thing were more like an excuse then anything so he could play around with his world.
Cars 3 looks to be better, but it probably won't be great though.
Oh yeah, that's what I meant by saying that they still put effort into them despite them being total merch machines, instead of them being just shit soulless DTV garbage.
Like, Cars 2 was born out of a deleted scene from Cars. In it, Lightning and Sally go on a date at a drive-in movie, and so they obviously had to "write" a "movie" for them to be watching. It was a spy movie featuring Finn McMissile. The scene got cut but the team assigned to making the movie within the movie really, really wanted to still use their idea, and that became the basis of Cars 2. So while I'm sure there would have likely been a Cars 2 regardless because of how much money the toys make, at least it came from a real place with an actual story people were enthusiastic about making, and not some studio mandate that nobody wanted to work on.
Fun trivia: this is also how the WALL-E short BURN-E got made. One of the board artists or writers kept trying to put in a scene to show that after he got trapped outside the AXIOM, BURN-E was still ok. He was like obsessed with the idea that it never cuts back to BURN-E so we don't know what happened to him. And he kept bugging and bugging Andrew Stanton about putting in a quick scene to show BURN-E was ok, and eventually, Stanton told him to just make it the short for the DVD.
_/¯