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Tire tracks from drifting (archive image)
Photo: Peter Endig / dpa
After incidents with so-called drifters, the police point out the dangers of such driving maneuvers.
"Whoever thinks they have to do that should also consider that they are not only endangering themselves, but also uninvolved third parties," said Thomas Mosbacher, police expert for traffic prevention in Hesse, the dpa news agency.
Drifting is - based on a term from motorsport - the hurling of the car with the rear breaking out.
"It is a dangerous undertaking and we are lucky that so far nothing more has happened in relation to the cases that have been identified," said Mosbacher.
There are no precise figures on road traffic incidents because the term drifting is not specifically listed in the statistics, as Mosbacher, who works at the State Criminal Police Office in Hesse, explained.
But one thing is certain: "There are incidents and the numbers are increasing, which we find during controls."
Fatal accident in Thuringia
In the past few weeks there have been several such cases in Hesse alone.
At the beginning of January, the snow-covered runway of the glider airfield in Gedern in the Wetterau district was used for drifting - the area was damaged by deep ruts.
A few days earlier, the police in northern Hesse broke up a meeting of drifters with 40 cars on the plateau on the Hoher Meißner.
In neighboring Thuringia, unlike in Hesse, there was already a fatal accident: at the beginning of January, a four-year-old girl died in Gera while she was on a toboggan trip with her parents.
According to the police at the time, the child was trapped when a man lost control of his car while drifting on the snowy surface and crashed into a van.
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wit / dpa