cars

When I was growing up, I loved to play with gadgets and electronics. The motorized rear view mirrors that you could control with a small joystick in my Dad's car were a favorite to mess around with. He got fed up with me and told me there's another way to move the mirrors by pressing the Saab emblem on the front of the glove box. After he secretly moved it when I pushed it about 5 times, he stopped and said I must have broke it.

Organick

When i was traveling with my parents in our car i believed that our King (yes i'm living in Sweden, a monarchy) always was driving first in the lane, in his car whit the queen. Whatever we where driving the Kings car was always the first car. Imagine that, can there be a first car in the lane? Silly or not...

William Dorner

I bought my first car (used) and right away it broke down. I said "It's a good thing I have car insurance". My mom explained that car insurance only pays for accidents. I was very shocked that I had to pay for the repairs myself. How dumb was I.

M

When I was little, before there were seatbelts, we had an old car, and the floor in back was getting rusty, so that you could see the road below through little holes. On long trips, we 9 kids used to take naps in the back window, on the seats, and on the floor. One day my mom, remarking about the little rust holes said "One of these days the whole bottom is going to fall out of the floor." I was terrified and never slept on it again!

Anon

Not mine, but a very intelligent mate of mine once asked his father while out in the car what the sticker with GB on the back of a car meant. His father asked him if he remembered what the red letter L meant, to which he replied "learner" - his father then had him believing well into his teens that GB meant "Getting Better"

Wayne, UK

When I was much younger I was terrified of learning how to drive and swore I would never drive as an adult. Why? Because I knew I could never figure out how to make those little movements of the steering wheel (the minor adjustments one makes when the road isn't completely smooth). I couldn't understand WHY people did that; it wasn't as if we were making teeny tiny turns.

Alli

When I was little my dad bought a new car. The first car I'd ever seen with cruise control. Dad was bragging about this wonderful feature. So I asked him - just what is cruise control. He explained that it made the car go by itself. I thought about that for a while then asked him - How does it know when to turn? I was so afraid that his new car was going to drive it's self off during the night that for several days I locked the garage door so it couldn't get out.

D Anne

I thought that cruise control meant you didn't have to steer. (I had heard that cruise is especially useful when driving long straight roads)

DogBoy's sister

Anytime anyone said we were "going over a bridge", I would freak out. I thought we were going to drive over the metal frame of the bridge, like a rollercoaster.

Anon

When I was younger, and watched old movies of people driving cars and moving the steering wheel left and right rapidly, I beleived that the faster they moved the wheel the faster the car actually went.

Anon

When I was like 3, I went to see Barney Live in Rockefeller Center. My mom told me we were gonna go through the tunnels. I imagined us crawling through a like pitch black touch tunnel. I fell asleep on the ride, so I was mad until I was like 10 because I thought I missed the fun!

Touch Tunnel ThreeYear Old

When I was about five, a friend of ours took us in her car one day through a "ford", where cars drove through the water. After driving through it ourselves we sat in an adjacent field and watched all the cars driving through the ford, which really fascinated me. There was a road sign saying “Ford” as you drove up to it. After that, whenever I saw a Ford car showroom by the roadside, with the “Ford” sign, I thought that meant it was a ford as in an expanse of water.

Alan, Sheffield

I used to think that if you left your car running with the keys in the ignition, that it would drive off by itself.

Toujin

Until recently, I believed that the mud shields under a car were the brakes!!! Like a bike, I thought that when the brake was pressed, the mud shields would push onto the wheel and stop the car. I only realised that they were not the brakes, when I thought to myself that I never see them moving!!! Duh.

F

When I was little my mom used to tell my younger brother and me that the car wouldn't start or go unless we had our seatbelts on. We believed this up until we were like 10 or 11. Fortunately though it always keeps us wearing seatbelts even when 15 years later we are now driving.

Belted in for safety

I was always too short to properly see out the windows of the car, and wasn't allowed to sit in the front, so I never saw out that way either. Now, have you ever seen a movie that shows a person driving down a perfectly straight stretch of road while turning the steering wheel madly back and forth? These two things in combination led me to believe, for a while, that whatever let the wheels of the car turn wasn't really connected to anything. They just sort of floated around by themselves, and you had to turn the wheel in order to keep them pointing in a straight line so the car would stay on the road.

Mily