A troop of Baboons attack the new Hyundai i30
Some of us are considered killjoys by our offspring because we refuse to take our pride and joy through a Safari Park. But maybe when we get the new Hyundai i30 in for a week soon we should pile the kids in the car and trot off to our nearest Safari Park?
That’s exactly what Hyundai has done with the new i30, leaving it at Knowsley Safari Park in the baboon enclosure for 10 hours to see what the locals made of the new Hyundai i30, a car VW boss Martin Winterkorn thinks is far too well made.
Remarkably, the i30 came out relatively unscathed from its baboon odyssey. Yes, the paintwork was a bit smeared and scratched and the interior needed the attention of Hyundai’s best valeter, but the i30 was intact and functional.
Hyundai say that letting the baboons loose on the i30 was simulating the sort of punishment the interior of a car gets in its lifetime from children; jumping up and down on seats, pushing and prodding buttons and opening and closing storage bins (if ours did that we’d have sent them for adoption long ago).
Hyundai even got Knowsley Safari Park’s General Manager to comment (we think Hyundai has a season ticket to Knowsley – didn’t they take the i40 there last year?). David Ross said:
For a baboon, to have a car to play with for a whole day is manna from heaven!
I’ve seen thousands of cars pass through this enclosure, get mobbed by monkeys, and none have lasted the distance as well as this Hyundai. These baboons are incredibly inquisitive. If you put them on any car they will scour it for the weak points and find any faults. At one point there were 40 monkeys in the car, pushing it to its limits – that’s ten times the size of the average human family!
It’s a great demonstration of the quality of Hyundai’s latest cars (even if we think they were just plain lucky the baboons didn’t actually eat the interior), even if the video is a bit ‘Dry’.
We’d have had the ‘King of the Swingers’ as a soundtrack, with more baboon and less talking heads. Or maybe Rowan Atkinson talking about how a ‘Flange’ of baboons took to the i30 (although that may have stretched the budget a bit)?
Still, Hyundai got their point across – the Hyundai i30 is better built than a VW Golf (because Herr Winterkorn says so), and baboon-proof too (because Mr Ross says so).
What more could you ask?
2012 Hyundai i30 Photos
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ReviveProAuto says
We are the company who cleaned the i30 after the baboon test in Knowsley and must say we where very impressed with Hyundai and the materials they used to build it,
Everything came up well and there where no scratches at all on the interior or exterior after the baboon test, which we found amazing. The i30’s made using good quality materials and really did stand up to the baboons, by the time we finished it was back to a high showroom display state, visit our YouTube channel to see the before & afters.
VCQ09 says
I feel sorry for whoever had to drive it out of there afterwards!
cicciogrecia says
Many kids are worse than these baboons all together!
nanachan0718 says
Next. “Macaca fuscata” in Japan!
jhardigree says
Looks like a scene from “The Omen.”
Lou500 says
You’ll be viciously mauled by monkeys, but at least the car will be okay.
socialmarketinguru says
Starring: Tony Blair, Sarkozy, Angela Merkel, Bush, Chirac, and some other members of EU