A wild elephant left drivers terrified as it walked among their vehicles on a national park road in Thailand.

The jumbo emerged from the woodland and ambled towards the oncoming traffic in the Khao Yai National Park in Nakhon Nayok province on January 5.

Footage shows the elephant sauntering beside a line of cars. It paused upon reaching Budsaya Worsing's truck to search for food, bumping its trunk against the cargo bed, but immediately left.

Driver Budsaya said: 'It was my first time driving through that road. We had kids with us. It was scary because we did not know what the elephant could do.'

Thailand has up to 3,500 elephants in the wild. The population has been increasing in recent years, but it is still a fraction of the estimated 300,000 wild elephants that lived in the country at the beginning of the 20th century.

The main threats to wild elephants in Thailand are habitat loss and fragmentation, poaching, and conflict with humans.