when i was little i used to belive that cars had genders, and the way to tell was by the shape of the headlights, if they were more square then the car was male if they were rounded then it was female

uva

When me and my sister were little, we thought that "rolling" our arms (putting them in front of our stomachs and making circles around and around) would make the car go faster. So when our family would make long trips on the highway, we'd say "dad, that car's coming up on us. We'll roll our arms to make us go faster". And we'd sit there and madly move our arms in circles, and little by little, we'd go faster. How stupid we were-didn't we know a car has such thing as a gas pedal?!

Becky

We had a Ford Pinto, with the back passenger windows that flap outward. I used to believe that if my brother and I flapped them open and shut fast enough, we could make the Pinto fly.

Gary

Circa age 6, I believed that when we crossed the Bay Bridge into San Francisco, we stopped so my father could pay the troll. (The troll lived in the building alongside the bridge, and the uniformed staff at the gates were his employees.)

Cathryn Bauer

I used to think what a shame it was that such nice looking cars were going "under the hammer" thinking they were going to be broken up, not merely being auctioned!

Anon

as a child i could never stand to travel in a car at night because all the lights you saw were red in front of you so, of course, this means you're on the road to hell because all the whilte lights coming towards you are going to heaven. then again when i did turn around i saw all the lights coming towards me were white and all the lights travelling further away were red. guess we were screwed either way.

r. jones

I used to believe that the blue high-beams light on the dashboard of the car was a radar that detected oncoming traffic. At night, I was too short to see the cars before my mom/dad did, but I soon noticed that every time I heard a click & the blue light turned off, a car would go by. It was only logical.

Dave

I used to believe that you needed to have curly hair in order to drive a car. I had confused the word "Perm" with "Permit". Both of which my mother received within the same week.

Megan C.

I used to live by an unpaved road. I believed that I could draw a map of the road while riding in the car by letting the bumps move my pencil along the paper.

Car Cartographer

Really, really odd...

When I was little I used to think that the way cars got around was that they had two invisible bits of string in the front with hooks attached. When the person wanted to move forward, they would press a button and one of the hooks would come out the front of the car and latch onto a lamp-post, then the string would be reeled in to drag the car along... then the same would happen on the other side of the road. I used to look out for the little hooks and strings (?!?!?!) I didn't realise what lamp-posts were really for lighting the road until I was about 7... :-S ODD KID

jezzi_j

When me and my 3 other siblings were misbehaving in the car, our parents would threaten to pull the car over and spank us. It turned out the be an empty threat, but I always beleived that cars pulled over on the side of the road (regardless of open hoods or smoke) were full of a bunch of rowdy kids getting spankings.

Frances

In our old car, there was a button that had a picture of little man on it, with little "air waves" near his feet.

This, of course, was the button to make the heat/air blow on your feet. But from far away, it looked like the hspe of a turkey. I thought it was the emergency turkey switch.

What would you use an emergency turkey switch for?

Jessica Tinch

I used to believe that drag racing actually involved men in drag.

Anon

my grandmother had me convinced that you should always lock the car door you were sitting next to, because at any moment it could fly open and you would fall out. I thereafter viewed car doors as unpredictable creatures with an unending desire to fling themselves open and kill me, and it's automatic to lock the door as soon as I'm in the car, even if the car door lock automatically.

Liz

I used to believe that if you went near a car's exhaust fumes your legs would get stuck together. It only occured to me that this was not actually the case when I was about 16 and finally came to really thinking about it!

Katie G

When I was around five years old, while my mother was driving, she would tell me not to stick my hands and arms out of the car while she was driving, because they would get chopped off. So I thought people in other cars carried axes and the minute I stuck out my arm, it would be actually chopped off with an axe.

Claudine

I'm not sure how old I was when I realized that, contrary to my Mother's stories, it is physically possible to start a car even when your seat belt isn't buckled.

Anon

When I was young and tried to sleep in the backseat of my parents car while driving down the highway, my parents would wait until I was dozing off and say excitedly to each other 'Look! Look at that herd of elephants! There must be 100 of them!" As dopey as I was even I knew that couldn't be [living in Canada] but they were persistant. I had to get up and look. They were twisted at times.

Craig H

When I was 5 or 6, I thought that a car wash was a car wish and that if you drove your car in you could wish for whatever car you wanted. I could never figure out why my parents didn't take advantage of this great invention! I wish I could now!

Lori

Whilst in the car I asked my mum where's that music coming from. She said 'WHERE d'you think! Its a man underneath the car'
For a long time I believed you could turn the knob in the car and the man
would sing to you.

Julian