Fun

April Fools’ Day Car Hoaxes

April Fools’ Day is coming up and some of you might be already planning to prank your colleagues, friends, neighbors and family members. We collected our top 5 automotive April Fools’ Day hoaxes that are perfectly clever and will help you get some great ideas for your own pranks.

  1. Personalized Tires
    In 2003, Dunlop Tires announced the launch of personalized tires that could be ordered according to their customers’ taste: “For hundreds of years people have been monogramming their clothes, and there’s certainly no shortage of personalized license plates, so why shouldn’t they be able to add a personal touch to their tires too?” revealed Ian McIntosh, General Manager of Advertising and Marketing Services (Dunlop Tires, Canada).
  2. Vertical Parking Locator
    Also in 2003, the carmaker Mini published ads in a number of Australian newspapers in order to promote Mini Cooper and introduce a new space-saving technology, the so-called vertical parking locator. The introductory sentence of the press release was as follows: “The world-first VPL allows MINI Coopers to be parked vertically against walls, thus saving substantial parking space.”
  3. Slow Camera Avoidance
    In 2006, BMW warned slow driving had become an almost as big problem as speed driving on British roads. They, therefore, announced the introduction of speed cameras, which would monitor drivers going more than 20 mph below the speed limit: “ZIP (Zoom Impression Pixels) is a pixel-based coating that covers the entire exterior of the car. If you are traveling below the speed limit in a range of a Slow Camera, sensors around the car detect the camera and the pixels immediately become blurred. This gives the impression of higher velocity and the Slow Camera is fooled into thinking the car is traveling at the correct speed.”
  4. Invisible car
    In 2009, the Daily Express revealed the arrival of invisible cars, covered in a “specially formulated clear plastic film”, which could hide them from any speed camera but could be normally detected by the human eye. While announcing the news, the inventor also explained the company should invent the invisible coat to wear while driving.
  5. Peugeot mood paint
    In 2012, Peugeot announced it developed the first car that could change the color according to the driver’s mood and emotions. With its specially developed psychochromatic coating, the paint could alter its molecular structure to emit light at varying wavelengths, which would then change the color of the car.