I thought that the reason there was glass over the instrument panel (battery gauge, fuel, etc.) to prevent people from manually grabbing the speedometer needle and jamming it well over 100 mph - because accelerating that quickly was almost certainly illegal.

andrew

I used to believe that my dad made the windshield wipers work by winking. Later I learned what interval wipers are.

Ris

On day when I was little, I asked my mom why we always stop at the gas stations and she said, its because the car needs food so it could run. One day I felt bad that the car never got any dessert, so I put some left over cake in the engine.

Anon

when we first got a car with electric windows, my sister and i coulnt figure out how the windows went down. my dad told us that they were voice activated.you just had to say "windows down" and windows up". he would say it and then at the same time, press the button. my sister and i tried for ages to get the windows down by voice, and he kept telling us we were saying it wrong.

cara

when i was little i didnt realise that the rounded lines on the windscreen of the car were from the windscreen wipers. i asked my dad what they were from and he told me it was the reflection of the mountains.

cara

When I was about five or six, I thought the "Hazard" button on a car, if pressed while the car was in motion, would make the car do a jump ala "The Dukes Of Hazzard". I never got up the nerve to press it, though.

Adam

When I was really little I believed that if the hazard lights turned on when you were driving the car would split in half and one half would turn left and the other right. Needless to say I was terrified of sitting in the middle.

anghi

Because of my name, Aaron, I once thought Air Conditioning was actually "Aaron-ditioning" and was for my pleasure only and to make other people cool you had to buy "Joe-ditioning" or "Sarah-ditioning" or whatever their name might be.
Yeah, I ate a lot of paint chips.

Aaron Guck

My father told me that if you heard a song playing on the car radio, and you wanted to hear it again, all you had to do was to back up the car to the start of the song and proceed forward again.

Ron

You know the automatic carwashes? You know, the one where you drive through and those blue scrubber things clean your car? Well, when I was little, I was scared to death of those things, so my sister told me that they were all relatives of cookie monster (the muppet from sesame street), and that they were having a family reunion! I can't believe I actually believed her!

Lissa

When I was a kid we used to take a lot of road trips, and when we got stuck in traffic my mom would always say, "look at this traffic jam." I was about 4 or 5 and I would look at the window for "traffic jam" but didn't know what she was talking about. Then, while playing outside, I saw some puddles in the street with oil floating in them, and I came to the conclusion that this was "traffic jam". I told this matter-of-factly to all my friends in elementary school, until my older sister made fun of me for it.

Anon

I used to believe that every time I saw a stretched limo it was either 1. Madonna (or) 2. Michael Jackson. Apparently those were the only celebrities in my world.

Anon

I used to hold my breath as I walked past cars waiting in traffic. I beleived the fumes would kill me instantly. It was difficuilt getting to school somedays.

Ken

Red cars cause accidents.
When I was around 5 my older brother told me that red cars are in the most accidents. Obviously, he was quoting something statistical. For years I thought there was something intrinsically dangerous with red cars and was puzzled why people would intentionally purchase something that was known as "more dangerous".

Chris Doyle

There used to be kids, wherever we drove, who would hide at the sides of the road and throw stones at me and the car I was in. I'd always peek out of the windows, looking for them, but I never caught a glimpse. They must be extremely good at hiding, I guessed.

Not until much later did I realise that the stones thrown by these evil kids were just the tyres throwing up gravel against the car.

ethan

I used to believe that the speed of our car depended on how strong my father’s legs were. I thought that we went uphill more slowly because he couldn’t press the gas pedal hard enough. I now think I’d made an analogy with the brake pedal. Once, our crowded car stalled while going up a hill and my dad said something like “The engine’s not up to this.” I was very puzzled because until then I’d thought that the engine’s job was just to amplify my father’s effort. I asked him about it, but it took several questions and a looong time for him to understand me.

Pablo Zumarán

A motorcycle was started by jumping up and down and bouncing on the seat.

Anon

When I was a kid, I loved music. I used to sing along to the radio in the car with my parents, and somehow I got the idea that other people would think I was a famous singer and move out of the way in their cars. So if my parents were in a hurry, I used to sing until the car ahead of us switched lanes.

Theresa

When I was little, I thought that when you wound down the window in the car, it would actually roll up into a cylinder of glass. This wouldn't have been too bad, except it took me until I was fifteen to realise that couldn't happen.

Anon

There was a garage on our block with a sign above the door that said, "All cars must come to full stop." I thought that "Full Stop" was the name of the garage and that every car in the world was obliged to come to it at least once.

CC