Your child names the cars in the car park, wants the hood open, and has opinions about wheels. Six car books here: pick by your child's age, and by which of the three things they're actually after: the machine itself, a world stuffed with vehicles, or the chance to invent one.
There are three different children inside 'obsessed with cars,' and this shelf sorts them. Some want the object - what a car is, what the parts are called, what's under the hood. That's My Car, which is Byron Barton stripping a car to flat shapes and primary colors and naming six things, the purest naming book here; Cool Cars, which labels every part inside a rhyme; and DK Eyewitness: Car, which is real photographs of real machinery and no story whatsoever. Some want a world stuffed with vehicles, and that's Scarry. Cars and Trucks and Things That Go is barely a car book: it's a seek-and-find with a thin plot underneath, hundreds of absurd labeled vehicles per spread, and Goldbug hidden on every page. Your child spends an hour on one page. That's a completely different act from reading a story, and it's exactly why the book has survived since 1974. And some want to make one up. If I Built a Car is a boy specifying his own design to his father, fireplace and swimming pool included. The Racecar Alphabet is Brian Floca turning speed and engine noise into language, A to Z, across a hundred years of real racing. Start wherever your child already is.