Want to drift like Travis Pastrana but don’t have the time to learn or the talent to do it without practice? CarBuzz has found a patent from BMW that could help you do it. It’s a new invention meant to help with the hardest part of the drift: getting it started.
It accomplishes that by doing something most people with powerful rear-wheel drive cars absolutely hate.
BMW Wants To Bounce Things Around A Bit
2026 BMW M2 CS. Drifting. Burning rubber. Power slide. Motion. Rear, three-quartersBMW
In “patent” terms, a drift is a driving maneuver where the rear tires have more slip angle than the front ones do. In the real world, it’s when you’re spinning the rears while the fronts stay mostly rolling at road speed. You hang the tail out wildly while maintaining control, and before you know it, you’re the drift king.
Getting a drift started is the hard part. When you’re already moving, getting the rear tires to spin takes some sort of violent action from the driver. It could be the handbrake, or a flick, or clutch kick, or several other techniques. Point being, each one of them is easy to do, but quite difficult to do right. It takes practice to snap the rear-end loose and then control it. BMW has an idea to help.
To do it, first the car needs to know you want to start a drift. It does that with sensors, calculations, and even just by asking the driver if that’s what they want to do. From there, BMW’s patent says: “an unsprung mass of the vehicle is shifted impulsively in at least approximately the upward direction of the vehicle, so that the load on the rear axle is temporarily reduced.”
If that has you scratching your head, here’s another snippet from the patent. “An impulse-like displacement refers to a displacement or acceleration of the unsprung mass that occurs suddenly and abruptly, such that the unsprung mass is displaced or accelerated upwards in the vehicle’s vertical direction within a very short time.”
In much simpler terms, a little rear-axle hop could help you get sideways.
BMW Wants To Bounce The Rear End To Start A Drift?
Red Bull Drift Brothers BMW M4YouTube/BMW
Yes, it will use the suspension to briefly lift or bounce the rear wheels, not unlike all that unwelcome axle hop you might get during smoky burnouts low-traction situations. That lowers the weight on them or puts them completely in the air, which reduces grip and makes wheelspin easier.
By lifting or bouncing the wheels, BMW says you can start a drift with very little torque, which in theory should make it easier to control. The system would only engage if you were in a hard corner or with a high level of steering angle. It would also monitor vehicle speed to make sure that a drift wouldn’t throw you off course. BMW suggests it would even store steering angle settings to limit when you can and can’t drift.
How do you bounce the rear axle? Using the adaptive suspension system or active roll control, of course. It would also work on the front axle, in case you want to try a drift in reverse. But that sounds a little bit insane. Actually, the whole idea sounds a little insane just to initiate a drift.
CarBuzz Insight – Why This Matters:
BMW longest drift refuelingBMW
Combine the feature with BMW’s Drift Analyzer, and suddenly you have a car that encourages driving sideways. It’s great that going sideways will be easier than ever, but that will also encourage drivers to try it more.
That’s fine on a closed course, but it’s a very bad idea on the road. One that’s sure to make plenty of enemies with law enforcement and the NHTSA.
Patent filings do not guarantee the use of such technology in future vehicles and are often used exclusively as a means of protecting intellectual property. Such a filing cannot be construed as confirmation of production intent.
Source: DPMA
