A koala survived a 16km road trip in Australia clinging to the axle of a four wheel drive vehicle, before the driver stopped and heard the cries of the  traumatised animal. The female koala had crawled into the wheel arch while the car was parked in the hills on the outskirts of Adelaide, the state capital of South Australia. “I could smell her burnt fur,” Jane Brister, from Fauna Rescue, told Reuters in a phone interview yesterday. Sadly, although the koala was uninjured, Brister said the animal was a lactating mother which meant her joey — the term for infant marsupials — was missing.