Riding the sandworms can be a lark.

Rich brats drifting, rich parents of brats racing expensive cars, 28475th prince ignoring traffic laws because royalty...gee, I'd have never imagined they have high traffic fatalities

I have never seen more insane traffic than that in Riyadh. The things I saw last year make this look like a fucking carnival ride. A slow one.

Key highlights: A car trying to ram us to get even for the driver innocently changing lanes. Children drivers as young as 11, including one that was bouncing up and down on his booster seat as his terrified black-veiled mother screamed in terror along with the other women in his family in the back seat, who were all equally screaming and wringing their hands. A Sudanese driver of mine who nearly killed some other dude by ramming HIM and then yelling at him to pull over so they could get into a 20 minute long screaming match while I wondered what I would tell the embassy should someone get killed in front of me, only for him to come back and tell me "I just had to tell him how stupid he was!" and I had to nod and pretend this was normal. People driving the wrong way on the opposite side of the street as everyone else, just because...??? Drift car racing at 1 am, 2 am, 3 am in the morning. A 16 year old crashing into a fucking traffic island and INTO A PALM TREE SURROUNDED BY NOTHING FOR LIKE 500 YARDS IN EITHER DIRECTION because he was texting. Constant, and I do mean constant, CONSTANT cars that just hover over two lanes slowly because Sheikh Hasdoughtoburn can't stop texting, either. A sheep that JUMPED OUT OF A TRUCK RIGHT IN FRONT OF US OH MY GOD WE'RE ALL GOING TO DIE never mind it's racing past traffic on the highway. Good luck, sheep!

I'm sure I'm leaving things out.

Thanks for sharing, RoUS. Did anyone there have any insight as to why people drive like that there? This "drifting" is pretty much the most sociopathic type of driving out there and it seems confined to the Middle East.

Oddly, it still isn't the most dangerous country in the world to drive in. Libya, Thailand and much of Africa appear to beat them for traffic related deaths per capita.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-rel ated_death_rate

I've been to Thailand and there it has much more to do with climate and treacherous roads in mountainous areas in the north. In Bangkok it's more like Mexico in terms of just people being crowded together so poorer areas are going to see more accidents. Completely different factors there.

The Middle East has money to burn and drift racing is a status symbol there. Like, hey, I don't need to take care of my car, I can waste it and buy another. Great.

Interesting... Yeah, that was always my impression of the primary underlying motivation behind hagwalah/tafheet. I always see a lot of comments about how if they had more drugs and alcohol, they wouldn't drive like this, but it seems obvious that it isn't the only reason. It seems there are a variety of socio-economic, cultural and even geographic reasons for this behavior. For instance, I've read that the thin layer of sand that permanently covers the street makes it pretty easy to get the rear end of the car to step out like that (obviously not super easy in a FWD car that already has a lot of forward momentum and stability, as most of these are). I've read other theories regarding fatalism in Saudi culture and how it goes hand in hand with reckless behavior, etc etc. I've just never really read any theories from anyone who has actually been there, seen it or done it, or has any similarly appropriate level of credibility. I could be looking harder, though, to be fair.

The "documentaries" on the subject are awful, particularly the Vice one where the host doesn't know enough to differentiate between professional style, competitive drifting and what these folks are doing on public streets in unmodified, disposable cars... Automotive culture is interesting to me, so I'm always keen to learn about it in countries other than the United States (which seems to have the least interesting contemporary car culture in the world, at least socially).