cars

For as long as I can remember, my parents have referred to the handle above your car door (on the inside) as the "Chickenhandle". I have believed that it was the proper term for this particular device for years upon years. I remember, at one point in time (about two or three years ago), asking my Dad if it was really called the Chickenhandle, to which he of course answered, "yes".
Let's make a long story short: I am fourteen now, and found out about five days ago that my parents really don't have any idea what the Chickenhandle is really called.

Caitlin from Canada

This one in not mine - it belongs to the boy I used to babysit: We were riding one hot day and I told him we needed to turn off the air conditioning because I was almost out of gas. He later explained to his father that the air conditioner of a car ran off a separate gasoline engine and you had to put gas in it, too.

Bonnie

when my younger cousin was about 5, my dad and I made him believe that our minivan was actually a space shuttle and we could make it blast off into space, only the wings were broken and we couldn't get them fixed. he actually believed this for quite a long time.

val

I used to be so enthusiastic after having had a banana outdoors.
If I passed by a parked car, I ever put the rind carefully in front of one of its tyres, which were pointed towards the open road. It was obvious to me that the car would skid when the driver set off and I always felt sorry I didn't have any other bananas for the rest of the tyres.
Well, I never practised that about buses and trucks for I would have had to eat kilos of bananas in order to make the driver happy. (But I didn't want my tummy to hurt out of overeating.)
My mother gave birth to this flawless belief and she was the person to kill it. Once (years later) she told me she'd been just kidding me.

Hristina

My mom told me when I was 3 that the car won't start unless if I buckled up my seatbelt. She didn't start it untill I did. Untill we went on a trip and the car started and moved w/o my seatbelt buckled, I was around 6 when that happened.

TROGDOR!!!

When i was about 11 my dad let me ride in the front seat of the car and one day i asked him what the big red button next to the handbrake did.
He told me it was an ejector seat and if you pressed the button the front passenger seat shot up through the sun roof and parachuted back down. I asked if he would let me have a shot and he told me to shut my eyes and he would press the button. He did and all the lights started flashing 'cos the "ejector seat" was actually the hazard warning switch.
I still get teased about it years l8r!

Jelly car

When i was little me and my older sister believed that cars with one headlight out were Chinese people, so everytime we were riding in the car with our mom and saw one, we'd scream "Chinese people! DUCK!!" and hide under the seats! why we hid from them... i have no clue.

Mandi

my older sister loved to torment me when we were younger. when i was 3 or 4 she told me that if you leave the car running for too long it will explode. well, mom always ran short errands and left us in the car with it running. As soon as mom left the car to do whatever she did, my sister kim, would remind me about the car exploding. i would scream and cry and bang on the windows yelling that the car was going to explode and my sister would just have this devilish smile on her face. i learned about a year later it wasn't true when the poop truck came to pump out our septic tank, and of course, left his truck running. I was expecting the truck to explode at any minute. "Mommy, won't his truck explode?" she laughed and asked me where i heard that. so i told her. Boy, did kim get in a lot of trouble that night. hee hee hee

kristina

I used to believe it was the road and the ground and the trees and the houses that moved, not the car...

i thought my nanny was awesome - she could move the whole world under the car...

puck

When I was little, and in the car with my dad, and he pushed the button for the cigarette lighter.... I always thought there was a dragon in it. So that when you pushed the button to start heating it up... there was a stick that poked the dragon, and he got mad a breathed fire on the lighter .. and voila, it was ready! I think I may have watched too much "Flintstone's" cartoons at that age... haha.

Brandy

My parents would often take the four boys to my grandparents cabin. This was about a 4 hour drive. My father always told us "if you take a nap, we can take the short-cut". I truly believed that my father would go the "long way" just to spite me if I or one of my brothers did not take a nap. In a flash of amazement, sometime in my Junior year of college, I finally realized there was no short-cut. Now that I have children of my own, it is now quite obvious it was my parents who truely benifited from "the short-cut".

Skillethead

When I was little we lived on a mountain. My parents named our oldest car Betsy. When ever we traveled up the mountain my Mom would say, "Lean forward so Betsy can make it up the mountain." I believed this to be true for all old cars until I was about 10.

Jeanette

When I was little, my mom told me that there was a little man that lived in the car and his job was to make the numbers on the odometer changed. His name was Mr Yahootie and his brother was the guy that turned on the light in the refrigerator.

Anom

i used to think that the button in our old station wagon...if pushed...would blow up the car...thanks to my dad, i made a fool out of myself many timeS!!

JAMIE

When I was about three or four years old, I used to think there were public toilets under the car seats for some reason. I had this notion that if I crawled underneath, there would be this huge tiled hallway and a door leading to the bathrooms - like you see in shopping malls.

sarah spoon mistress

I always used to think that speed limits had sometihng to do with lemons, because limit and lemon sounded alike. I would always get this weird mental picture of some place full of lemons whenever we passed by a speed limit sign.

anonymous

When I was little (And I still am), around 14 (Im 15 now).. So, not even a year ago, my mother and I were on our way to Tim Hortens.. My sister was there with us, she's only a year younger than me..
My mom had just baught her new car and said it was great because there wasn't alot of kilometers..
I was like "But dont you WANT kilometers?"
My sister looked at me and was like "No, wtf!"
Then I go "But if you run out of kilometers, how would you get anywhere?"
I use to think that kilometers meant how far you could go.

My mom thought this was SO funny, every new person she meets and asks her about her new car, she mentions my story to them! How embarassing on my part!

Missa ~SoapSuds

It was 1984 and I was 10 years old, at school we had a project to do, we had to do a book all about about yourself, well the last part of the project was to answer the following question: what do you think the world will be like in the year 2000? I was totally convinced that because the year sounded so futuristic that there was no reason why there wouldn't be flying cars, I believed this for a few years and seeing 'Back to the future'(at the end, they fly into the future) confirmed to me that this was likely to happen, then I grew up and got real

Giz (can my car take off yet?)