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"It appears that Giorgi Tevzadze, the Russian &amp;quot;street drifter&amp;quot; who achieved Internet fame through a series of YouTube videos, has died in the passenger seat of his E34 BMW M5. In his videos, Tevzadze alternated between lurid drifting through Eastern European cities and terrifying segments in which he used 100 percent of the road to make a series of completely unjustifiable passes on urban streets. He swerved through vehicles, split lanes, and often swung out to zip through oncoming traffic at closing speeds.       The terrible beauty of these videos is that things appear to never go wrong. Whenever Giorgi needed a break, he got it: A van halts a turn across his path, transforming a closed-casket funeral into a daring pass. He turns a drift around a crowded street corner into a tank-slapper, but the women and children happen to be on the other side of the road. He seemed to be using up his luck as quickly as an M5 at full throttle swallows fuel. But when the final bell rang, Tevzadze wasn&amp;#039;t driving. He was observing.  Even knowing how the man&amp;#039;s story ended, after watching the way in which Tevzadze abuses his gorgeously shopworn 3.8-liter BMW, it&amp;#039;s frankly tempting to consider the prospect of tossing some all-season tires on my Boxster and making a similar video, right here in the United States. It isn&amp;#039;t like I haven&amp;#039;t done similarly irresponsible things on public roads. I&amp;#039;m put in mind of English lexicographer Samuel Johnson and his opinion of famed philosopher David Hume here:  &amp;quot; If I could have allowed myself to gratify my vanity at the expense of truth, what fame might I have acquired. Every thing which Hume has advanced against Christianity had passed through my mind long before he wrote.&amp;quot;  Every single thing you see on Tevzadze videos is something I&amp;#039;ve already done, with the exception of the long showboat second-gear drifting, which has never really interested me. In my immortal youth, I simply drove everywhere with my foot to the floor, and if I saw a cop I stayed flat until he was gone. It never occurred to me to film any of it any more than it would occur to a burglar to blog about what he&amp;#039;s stolen. I just did it because I thought it was cool and because I wanted to see what I was capable of doing. I wanted to test my own limits, and I didn&amp;#039;t stop to think about the potential consequences that my actions might have on my own life or on the lives of others.  Why  did I think it was cool to do that stuff? I never thought to ask. It seemed self-evident. Fifteen years later, I can look back and take a more measured approach to the question. Is there anything inherently, intrinsically cool about driving full throttle on crowded public roads? The results of that behavior certainly weren&amp;#039;t cool. At best, I could say I&amp;#039;d done it and have no proof of the deed; at worst, I could have wound up in prison or dead.  Truth be told, the process of driving that fast and recklessly results in a constant state of terrified awareness. It&amp;#039;s not like racing, where you have a goal, work towards that goal, and are only intermittently frightened when things go wrong. It&amp;#039;s perpetual, twitching fear\u2014of a van turning into my path; of tank-slapping into a parked car and smashing my 200SX into recycled-can proportions (sorry, Dad); of running wide in a four-wheel slide, clipping a curb at 70 mph, and ripping the suspension arms off a 1998 Passat (guilty as charged, Your Honor); of the perfectly positioned policeman able to run me to ground and drag me off in cuffs (never happened, thankfully).  What was the point? I now think it was as simple as a caveman wearing a bearskin. Yes, I said &amp;quot;a caveman wearing a bearskin.&amp;quot; The caveman wants to be as strong as the bear. He wants its ferocity and its courage. So, he kills the bear, skins it, and wears the fur hoping that some of the bear&amp;#039;s essence will transfer into him.  Like all young men, I wanted to have an identity; and like all young men, I appropriated elements of that identity from things I&amp;#039;d seen, like the ice-cool heroes in movies like Against All Odds and Ronin, who toyed with danger and death on the road. (And surely, it&amp;#039;s no coincidence that our Georgian drifter&amp;#039;s car so closely resembles the one Natascha McElhone drives in the film, now is it?)  I wore the skin of the bear. If James Woods could dive into the oncoming lane and through red lights in his Ferrari, I could do it in a Volkswagen Fox. If De Niro held his face in a stolid grimace while breaking triple digits on downtown four-lanes in a Peugeot, I could do it in a BMW 330i. But I was confusing appearance with reality: I was imitating things that didn&amp;#039;t really happen.       Tevzadze comes off as anything but cool in his videos. He saws at the wheel and rarely, if ever, appears to be in control of the vehicle. Whatever the opposite of calm and collected would be, that&amp;#039;s him. He appropriated the signifiers of cool but forgot to be cool enough to be significant. As a result, the videos are only really interesting in a wait-for-the-crash sense. He&amp;#039;s what kids today call a &amp;quot;try-hard,&amp;quot; frantically jerking his used Bimmer around in hopes of becoming somebody. In the end, he became a statistic.  In the long run, this sort of thing hurts automotive enthusiasm much more than it helps. It gives the opponents of personal motorized freedom another arrow for their overstuffed quiver. Every person that his M5 passed sideways is one fewer person who will oppose Draconian restrictions on new cars when the government gets around to proposing them. It associates &amp;quot;car guy&amp;quot; with &amp;quot;douchebag&amp;quot; in the public mind and sets a bad example for young drivers. It&amp;#039;s easy for me to say because I&amp;#039;ve already spent my time looking at oncoming traffic through my side windows, but if you&amp;#039;re tempted to do something like this, don&amp;#039;t. Not because Tevzadze died doing it, but because it&amp;#039;s possible to have a meaningful life doing something completely different. Leave the bear and its skin alone. Be yourself, cool or uncool, and join the rest of us at your local racetrack, autocross course, or rally checkpoint. The stories you&amp;#039;ll add to your life will be just as exciting. I promise. And unlike the man with the M5, you&amp;#039;ll probably live to tell them. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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