transport: cars

I thought an automatic car (i.e. automatic transmission) meant the car drove itself just like "Herbie" in the Walt Disney films. I was constantly on the look out for one of these "automatic cars".

When I was younger I would always look at what direction we were going in the car because we had the built-in compass thing. When it read SW or NW or SE or NE I would tell my mom that she was driving crooked.

I used to believe that you could squeeze jumper cables with your hands to jump-start a car (with one end attached to the car battery, of course). I guess this belief started when I saw Vicki the Robot do it on "Small Wonder."

When I was young my dad had me believe that cat's eye's in the middle of the road were small lights that he could turn on & off using a switch in the car. He would flick the switch and hey presto the lights in the road turned off, another flick and they were back on :)

I used to believe that the 'hazard' button on your parents car if/when pushed would go into auto-pilot and take you to the Dukes of Hazard town. Yep, a child of the late 70's and early 80's, that's me!!!

As a kid I thought grownups made the car move by turning the steering wheel back and forth. The faster you moved the steering wheel, the faster the car went. Not sure how old I was when I finally noticed the gas and brake pedals.

when i was about 7 or 8 years old, i thought that cruise control meant that the car would drive automatically where you wanted it to go, which is why i was always confused why adults spent time actually doing the driving themselves, until i figured out that cruise control meant something els a year later...

A friend told me and a few other friends the other day that her mom had told her when she was little that if she inhaled petrol fumes she would die, so every time her parents went into a gas station, my friend would hold her breath!

I used to believe that if me and a car pushed against each other at a dead stop, I could win. I figured this so because when I saw the car's torque was for example, 146lbs/ft, if my added total weight I could lift with my arms plus legs was greater than the cars torque, I'd surely win.

When I was about 3-7 years old, my parents parked their cars in a drive way that was directly behind our living room wall, and whenever we would be sitting in the living room at night, I was afraid that my parent's cars would start up on their own and try to kill us all by running through the living room wall and run us over.

I used to like to watch Laverne and Shirley when I was little. In the opening credits, it showed them working in some kind of bottle factory, and one of them would stick there glove on a bottle as it passed through the factory (does anyone remember this?) Well, when me and my sister were little and fighting over something in the car, my dad would say, "give me that, I'm putting it in the glove compartment". I used to cry and get totally freaked out because i thought the glove compartment was where Laverne and Shirley worked and that I would never see my toy again.

Once my mum came home from a shopping trip when I was about 5, saying that while driving home the she had been 'drawn like a magnet' towards some shop or other. I couldn't work out how this was possible, imagining as I did the car being attracted by a huge horseshoe shaped magnet floating in the sky!

One afternoon I was sitting on the porch watching the occasional car go by, not being able to see the drivers. I then decided to count how many moving cars I could spot that were driving on their own.

When my parents were driving, and I was in the passenger seat, I believed that we were actually colliding with everything I could see in the windshield. I just couldn't feel it.

my mom told me that the emergency light button in the car was an ejector seat . every time that anyone went remotely near this button i absolutlely crapped myself. i beileved this till i was nine :(

For some strange reason I used to think Hummers were the cars used to carry the dead in funeral processions. It took me until I was about 14 years old to realize the hearses carried the dead people, not Hummers.

When I was a kid, I met a man who had lost 4 of his fingers on the one hand. I was told that he lost them on a fan belt in the car, so from then on I was terrified that I would lose my fingers if I touched the air conditioning cover in the car, where you adjust the intensity of the air coming through... little did I know that the fan belt was under the bonnet, and had nothing to do with the air con cover.