Forget drifting your car, it’s dangerous, expensive and a little hoonish. Enter the Local Motors Verrado drift trike which allows you to get sideways without the hoon…

IF YOU’VE EVER visited YouTube you’ll know just how popular driving sideways is. Indeed, Ken Block has built a career out of it. Well, a second career, anyway.

Now, no matter what your mates will tell you, driving sideways in a controlled manner isn’t easy. At the recent-ish launch of the BMW M3 and M4 in New Zealand journalists were given the opportunity to try and drift an M3 around a flooded skidpan. You’d think nothing would have been easier … just about every single one of us spun. And more than once.

But a few years before that I tested a Mercedes-Benz Vito van that had a very special set of tyres. Wrapped in some sort of slipperier-than-the-most-slippery-substance known to either man or woman it caused the Vito to lose traction almost immediately. The exercise was designed to show off the on-board traction and stability control systems, which it did very well… stay with me.

Enter Local Motors, you know, them of the Rally Fighter and the 3D printed car which will be commercially available from next year (2015). Well, now it’s allowing adults who are still just big kids to get sideways on a tricycle.
See the funny looking wheels in the picture at the top of the page, well, they’re like those slippery Vito van tyres. They’re a regular pneumatic tyre wrapped in PVC and they allow you to get all kinds of slip angles, watch one of the videos below for any idea.

So, what’s this thing called? It’s the Local Motors Verrado drift trike and it can be had with an electric motor or non-powered for those who like to drift downhill. For the record, I wouldn’t like to do that… Sure, I’m no oil painting but I’m not keen on picking concrete out of my teeth.

The powered drift trike is capable of running at up to 32km/h in a straight line and on a smooth surface, and thanks to the electric motor the Verrado won’t sound like your drifting a lawn mower. Yeah, we want one of the powered ones. Actually, we want two… drifting in pairs is more enjoyable.