mystery twin car headcanons....
dipper takes drivers training the minute he can and gets his license on the third try. (first try he messed up the parking and therefore didn't even get out of the parking lot. second try he got shaky and messed up a turn.) he nearly threw up before the test and then actually threw up after he passed the test from excitement. he spends a few months after passing white-knuckling the wheel whenever he does more than drive to school because the thought of causing an accident stresses him the hell out, but with time he calms down.
his car is an 90s/early 2000s old beater a family friend of a friend wants to be rid of--his parents could've gotten him a nicer one but think the beater is a good learning experience. he keeps it for far longer than anyone expects, and also it's a mess. the trunk is full of junk he doesn't even know about.
dipper's actually half-decent at knowing what's wrong with his car due to slightly awkward grunkle-nephew bonding sessions involving fixing the stanleymobile that stan insisted upon. (he thinks this makes him cool. maybe it does, maybe it doesn't.) whenever there's a problem he calls either stan or soos about how to fix it. stan tries to convince him to put in probably-illegal modifications to it more than once.
post-16, that beater car becomes the official transportation to gravity falls for the summer instead of the bus, except for when they're nineteen and both of them have headcolds and absolutely refuse to drive. then they take the bus. it's as nostalgic as it is boring.
mabel also took driver's ed and could've taken the test right after, but she was happy to just keep bumming rides from people, mostly dipper and his new old car or her friends if he's not available. its only after a year or two that she gets the license just to have it, and it's understood that while their parents consider the beater car dipper and hers, the twins know it's dipper's car that she borrows sometimes. she still prefers bumming rides. driving is boring!
when she does later get her own car for college, it's a vw bug she bought off of a friend of hers and she customizes the shit out of it. fun bumper stickers (half of them handmade), painted sides, a vanity plate (the MBLMBL, aka "Mabelmobile", maybe lol), she probably even takes out the decorative stitching in the seat covers and redoes them with pink thread. she's also pretty alright at fixing the car, but she's perfectly willing to let the check engine and other lights sit unchecked for weeks if she doesn't think they're too big of a problem. if the car isn't making an alarming clunking noise, she'll just shrug and get to it later. it stresses dipper the hell out.
her car is moderately more clean than dipper's but still pretty cluttered with all of her craft and club and sports stuff. the seats are barely useable--not like there's much space in a bug anyway. she laments this and how it stifles fun road-trips with the gals, and then just borrows dipper's cars for fun road-trips and lets him have hers for a while. she always gets it back with something fixed, the check light off, and a post-it note on the dash telling her to stop letting stuff fester that she'll ignore. and cans of soda on the floor she'll give him shit for.
there's a non-zero chance that mabel gets a crappy old van and decks it out with dipper and she goes and lives a #vanlife for like, a year after college. for funsies. and then she passes it off to a friend and gets a more reliable car that she once again bedazzles the hell out of. dipper gets a honda and only adds soda stains to its design. they're both pretty happy with them.
2087
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