Watch autonomous cars do doughnuts and drift sideways round corners

Toyota is teaching driverless cars to deliberately skid sideways at high speed while still safely navigating a course. The company says the technique wouldn’t be used on the road as part of the normal driving experience, but could give an autonomous car the ability to recover from skids in an emergency.

Drifting is a driving technique in which drivers intentionally lose traction but maintain control to slide the car sideways around corners (see video, above). Drifting cars around tracks has become a sport in its own right.