MOTORING NEWS - Siyabonga Joko made the first ever social test drive when he took a Volkswagen Amarok pick-up on a 492km round-trip through beautiful but challenging terrain to deliver sewing machines, overlockers and fabrics to a woman's sewing group in the isolated rural community of Lady Frere.

 

His journey arose out of an advertising agency brief to generate test drives for the Volkswagen Amarok in South Africa.

 

Ogilvy & Mather Cape Town’s Nicholas Wittenberg said “we sort of had an AirBnB moment as we realised that we could create a peer-to-peer connection between two parallel worlds - potential pick-up owners who are driving around every day to no purpose beyond a limited and self-contained trial of the vehicle in a tarred urban environment and the thousands of organisations and communities which are in desperate need of a pick-up to make urgently needed deliveries in inaccessible places."

The result was the Amarok Social Test Drive which re-purposed the routine test drive into a beneficial programme of community interventions around South Africa and, in the process, provided a demonstration of the virtues of the vehicle.

The initial challenge was to find a way to connect the drivers with the deliveries. “We began on a small scale by using social media sourced entries for a digitally-based competition to find five Social Test Drivers for a predetermined cause”.

 

This resulted in Siyabonga making his journey to Lady Frere and other deliveries of books and other supplies for under-resourced schools, and desperately needed provisions for an animal sanctuary.