Watch world's biggest Zorb on a roll

Published Oct 27, 2014

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Berrill Valley, Wiltshire - This, sports lovers, is the world's biggest Zorb - big enough to hold a small family car - and no, Cyril, it has nothing to do with facial acne.

It's more like a gynormous airbag.

Zorbing, much like that other chunderous pastime, bungee jumping, originated in New Zealand.

You climb inside an inflatable sphere made of hardwearing, semi-transparent plastic sheet, with another layer inside it to shield you from too-firm contact with the less forgiving features of the local landscape.

Then a couple of sniggering assistants roll you down a grassy slope; the effect is rather like an Aerotrim gym machine, but without the element of control. Where you wind up, is in the lap of the gods - hopefully, not literally.

PUT A NOTE IN IT!

Then somebody at Nissan Europe came up with the bright idea of building a Zorb big enough to take a Note hatch, to emphasise the all-round protection provided by the Note's Safety Shield technology - a suite of driver assistance systems intended to alert the driver to potential hazards.

The result is an inflatable plastic blob six metres in diameter and more than 18 metres in circumference, that took more than two months to build and weighs more than a ton and is nicknamed, predictably, the CarZorb.

They took it to a top-secret military training facility in somewhere in England, parked a Note inside the deflated bottom half, zipped it up and inflated it using a bigger version of the compressor that drives a jumping castle.

Then the PR maven whose idea it was in the first place, muttering something that sounded like “It seemed like a good idea at the time”, jumped into the camera 'copter to get the hell out of the way while the aforementioned sniggering assistants tugged on ropes and on plastic and eventually got two-and-a-bit tons of completely uncontrolled plastic and metal rolling down a grassy slope.

Watch the results in the video below.

No Notes were harmed during the making of this video.

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