Okay, this is nuts. From Yahoo! News – Oddly Enough:
A boy drove his mother’s car to a video store in the middle of the night, police said — and he’s all of 4 years old.
Even though he was unable to reach the accelerator, the boy managed to put the car in gear and the idling engine provided enough power to take him slowly to the store, a quarter-mile from his home, about 1:30 a.m. Friday, Police Chief Doug Heugel said. Finding the store closed, the youngster began a slow trip home.
I remember when I was a kid, Dad used to like to have us shift the gears for him in his pickup. I was always terrified by this. I was afraid I would do something wrong and break the car. He let us pretend to steer, too, but as his trucks didn’t have power steering, we really only did that on stretches of straight road. That didn’t bother me as much, because I’d be in his lap, and I knew he could grab the wheel immediately.
It has occurred to me, of course, that my experience is not extrapolatable to humanity as a whole, but the fact that a kid thought nothing of driving his mother’s car down to the store still shocks me.