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Basic Trope: A child who's way too young to legally or safely drive, drives a car.

  • Straight: Alice, who's 8 years old, drives a car.
  • Exaggerated:
    • A baby drives a car.
    • A kitten drives a car.
    • A duckling drives a car.
    • Alice is somehow the world's best driver and a champion at Car Fu, even though she's too small to see over the dashboard.
    • Alice is somehow the world's best driver and a champion at Car Fu, even though she's a fetus.
  • Downplayed:
    • Alice is at a legal driving age, but she doesn't have a license.
    • Alice has a car license, and drives a truck/bus.
    • Alice only has her learner’s permit (or the in-universe equivalent) and drives under supervision.
  • Justified:
    • Alice lives in a place where child labor is routine, she has a lot of experience driving farm equipment, and she's modified the car with a brick and booster seat to make things easier.
    • Alice is only driving on private property.
    • The adult driving is having an medical emergency, unconscious or whatever state in which they can't drive, so Alice has no choice but to drive.
    • The setting is a Teenage Wasteland, and there are no adults around to drive.
    • All cars are kid-sized.
    • Alice is a car.
  • Inverted:
    • Alice is an adult but struggles to drive a tiny, child-sized car.
    • Alice is an 80-year-old woman who's never even been in a car, let alone driven one.
  • Subverted:
    • A car comes up with what looks like a child behind the wheel, but it's actually Alice, who's 22 but looks like an 8-year-old.
    • Alice is driving a quadracycle sporting a car-shaped outer shell, at a Traffic-themed educational park.
  • Double Subverted:
    • Alice lied about her age, and she really is an 8-year-old.
    • Alice may be 22, but with her kid-sized body she has the same struggles as any child with driving.
  • Parodied: 8-year-old Alice gets behind the wheel, Drives Like Crazy, and kills a bunch of people in an over-the-top gorn and Black Comedy-filled fashion.
  • Zig-Zagged: ?
  • Averted:
    • Alice never drives a car.
    • Alice is of the legal age to be driving.
    • There are no cars or no children in the setting.
  • Enforced: Alice was originally written as The Team's getaway driver, but the executives demanded the writers insert a Kid-Appeal Character, so the writers de-aged her while keeping the rest of the script the same.
  • Lampshaded: "Pretty crazy what a good getaway driver Alice is, considering she's way too young to drive."
  • Invoked: After kidnapping her, the villain forces Alice to serve as his chauffer.
  • Exploited: The villain uses the fact that Alice drove illegally to blackmail her into working for him.
  • Conversed: "Why do all these action movies have kids driving cars in them?"
  • Discussed: "For crying out loud, there's a kid driving that car!"
  • Implied: Alice's parents' car goes missing, and Alice is later seen walking through a parking lot by herself.
  • Defied:
    • Alice's parents' keep the keys somewhere locked and secured away from Alice, or at least in a safe place she wouldn't suspect.
    • Alice's parents, an responsible adult or an police officer stop Alice before she crashes into or hits anything or anyone.
  • Deconstructed:
    • 8-year-old Alice gets behind the wheel of a car, runs over both her parents, then crashes the car into her house, wrecking both. Alice is left with life-long injuries and emotional scars, and refuses to ever drive as an adult.
    • Alice struggles to drive the car, and doesn’t make it very far before being pulled over by a cop who gets Alice’s parents indicted for negligence and child endangerment.
  • Reconstructed: Alice still kills her parents, but she is determined to never let this happen again, and devotes her life to becoming an incredibly skilled driver, and building special cars that can safely be driven by children.

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