A child looks upon the modern automobile as a spaceship, magical yet real, and substitutes imagined explanations for technical knowledge. What's your favorite childhood automotive myth?
This one comes from a friend, but many of us probably have similar stories. A speedometer makes perfect sense, as we're taught at a young age what speed is, but why is there a limit to it? Why can a car only go so fast? The concepts of weight, and power, and gearing are foreign to most children so there's an obvious question as to what happens when your car reaches top speed. For our friend and his mother's Malibu station wagon there was an obvious answer to what happens when the car drives 85... it explodes! Like Chuck Yeager breaking the speed of sound, hitting the top speed in a car meant blowing up. Like most myths, if you consider the build quality of old Malibu station wagons there's probably some truth to this.
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Photo Credit: Andrew Hathaway/CarDomain</em.