Basic Trope: Women do not drive well.
- Straight: Alice is a terrible driver who has no respect for the rules of the road.
- Exaggerated: When Alice is on the road, a state of national emergency is declared.
- Downplayed: Alice isn't a bad driver, but she has trouble with refined techniques such as parallel parking on a busy street.
- Justified:
- Alice has no experience driving.
- Alice is drunk.
- Alice is a Funny Foreigner who learned to drive in her home country which has different roads and standards.
- Alice lives in a barely-reformed former No Woman's Land where women were formerly banned from driving; chauvinistic male instructors don't bother to train women to drive properly since they don't see why they should, whilst examiners are under government pressure to pass as many women as possible in order to look good internationally and so lower the bar for passing tests.
- Alice is The Ditz and/or The Klutz and has problem doing things like calculating how hard she steps on the pedals or how much distance her car must have to do a turn.
- Alice doesn't know how to drive, but circumstances are forcing her to do so regardless.
- Alice has an extensive history of destructive road rage, with at least one related ticket every month.
- Inverted:
- Men are dangerous, reckless drivers while women actually follow the rules of the road.
- Alice is a surprisingly Badass Driver and no drivers can beat her skill.
- Subverted: Bob is terrified of driving with Alice, but it's just his prejudice showing through; she drives perfectly well,
- Double Subverted:
- ...and as she's gloating about this fact she stops looking at the road, and promptly crashes.
- ...but she gets a very bad time to develop a case of road rage.
- Alternatively, Alice does a Car Fu and crashes on oncoming traffic.
- She drives perfectly well in a tactical combat course. The moment she enters a regular road, she overstresses and develops a lead foot, leading to several near-misses.
- Parodied:
- Alice somehow rammed her car into a satellite in space, causing a chain of events that ultimately results in a Zombie Apocalypse.
- Bob mentions no woman can drive well only to show he's a poor driver himself, which makes other men assume he's therefore a woman in disguise.
- Zig-Zagged: Male drivers are no better — on average. However, there are a few good male drivers — but the absolute best driver in the world is a female. But she still tends to forget that the average drive down Route 66 isn't supposed to be a reenactment of The Gumball Rally.
- Averted:
- Gender is not a determinant of driving skill.
- Nobody drives, so the question of how a woman compares to a man or a nonbinary person never comes up.
- Everyone drives either poorly or well.
- Enforced: It's a sitcom playing on gender stereotypes, and this one would be conspicuous by its absence.
- Lampshaded: "How about those wacky woman drivers, eh?"
- Invoked: The People's Republic of Tyranny makes it illegal to teach women to drive, so when in an emergency a woman must drive, she tends to be very bad at it.
- Exploited: Alice takes advantage of her reputation as a poor driver to convince Bob to chauffeur her around.
- Defied: After Alice is old enough to start taking driving lessons, she takes them under a former F1 racer, over a year or two.
- Discussed: "Alice is driving? Better wear a seatbelt..."
- Conversed: "You can tell this is an old sitcom by all the women drivers jokes."
- Implied: One of the first things Bob notices about the car used for the driving course Alice is taking is the massive sign on the roof that reads: "Warning — Woman Student Driver at the Wheel — Extreme Danger". Bob questions how overtly sexist the sign is until he sees how Alice drives.
- Deconstructed: Alice's bumbling driving has completely demolished her family's finances.
- Reconstructed: Alice is placed in a Chase Scene and her demented driving causes the bad guys to crash and burn by the dozens, mostly while trying not to get hit by her.
- Plotted a Good Waste: The whole discussion about Alice being a crappy driver because she's a woman is a Debate and Switch. It turns out that Alice is a crappy driver because she is stoned out of her mind literally all day long and anybody would be a shit driver under those conditions.
- Played for Laughs: Alice's demented driving and the results of it (Acquainted with Emergency Services, passengers develop a Trauma Button, etc.) is one of the Running Gags of the show.
- Played for Drama: Alice gets people killed and it gives the sexist douchebags of the cast more ammunition to mock her.
- Played for Horror: Every woman in the country becomes a Mad Max-caliber psychopath whenever she gets behind the wheel and not a day goes by where double- or triple-digit Car Fu massacres are reported.
Be careful on the road and be sure you watch out for those Women Drivers!
