Blog: Ralph Morton

What’s your idea of an endurance test? Blasting a car round the infamous Nurburgring at high speed for 24 hours? Perhaps the scorching heat of Death Valley?

Or how about Knowsley Safari Park?

Here, at the safari park in Merseyside, where Wayne Rooney’s car was deftly monkey mangled, it was a case of monkey v machine in a different type of endurance event. To see if the new generation Hyundai i30 could stand up to the inquisitive bashing from baboons for 10 hours – in which case, it’s likely to stand up anything your family can meet out to it!

Surprisingly, apart from a filthy interior, the car survived amazingly well. The roof was jumped on, the headrests munched, buttons prodded and, at one point, it looked like the dashboard would be wrenched off.

“For a baboon, to have a car to play with for a whole day is manna from heaven!” David Ross, General Manager at Knowsley Safari Park commented after the Hyundai emerged relatively unscathed from its monkey antics endurance test.

“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! I’ve seen thousands of cars pass through this enclosure, get mobbed by monkeys, and none has lasted as well as this Hyundai.”

Felicity Wood, i30 Product Manager at Hyundai, said: “You have to be pretty brave to subject a business car to the most rigorous quality testers in the world. The fact that the Hyundai i30 survived with only a few scrapes is testament to the way a modern Hyundai is designed and engineered. We really do give a monkey’s about building tough cars!”

Monkey 0. Machine 1.