The Worst April Fools’ Jokes of The Car Industry

We’ve heard Dad jokes funnier than this

The car industry is already full of bad jokes such as the Government’s change in attitude towards diesels, BMW going FWD and of course, the Fiat Multipla. That being said, when April 1st comes around the car industry never disappoints and people of the car industry always put forward their best attempts at an April fools’ prank…. or so you would like to believe.

An April fools’ joke is hard to pull off and this year, there were plenty of blunderous attempts at humour. A good April fools’ joke should be ridiculous, but simultaneously somewhat believable. It’s a fine line that’s hard to walk and this year, the car industry has failed us. So, let’s dive right in…

2019’s worst April fools’ joke – The Hyundai N Roadster

Here at Motor-Vision we feel very embarrassed for Hyundai at the moment because their “April fools’ joke” was a complete failure. The intention was good but the punchline was terrible and the whole thing just fell flat.

The Australian N Performance Facebook page decided it’d be funny to release fake renders of a new N Roadster and that they would fool us by having us believe the car was in the works. The problem with this joke is that it actually would be great if they made this thing. No one was laughing, but rather mildly irritated that this cool concept is nothing more than a joke to Hyundai.

Let’s just hope they were testing the response they got and the N Roadster will materialise into a reality.

Castle Combe Circuit

Honestly, this is so bad it’s made its way into good joke territory.

The main reason it’s in this list is the God-awful Photoshop job and the fact that the joke itself is not even 1% believable. That being said, it was pretty funny.

Castle Combe Circuit is a 1.85-mile track based in Wiltshire and will now be its own “sovereign state” due to “current Brexit uncertainties” and will adopt an “airport-style passport control procedure”.

The reason for the poorly pasted and outdated Lewis Hamilton photo is that “Castle Combe Circuit plans to use its new-found status to host its very own leg of the popular Formula 1 championship”. Makes sense!

The best part about their joke was probably this:

‘Unfortunately, local F1 star Jenson Button was unavailable for comment, but we were able to track down Ernie Wiggins, his ex-primary school teacher. “I’ve never met nor heard of Jenson Button, but am sure he’d be very happy with the news.”’

Land Rover installs the UK’s most isolated remote charging point

Range Rover told the world on Monday that they had just installed a remote charging point in the middle of nowhere in the Isle of Skye, 15 miles from the nearest road. This joke was likely made to promote their hybrid engines found in their P400e models.

“Max Watts” is apparently the Head of Vehicle Charging over at JLR and said “We really have gone above and beyond, and ohm-mitted nothing in our quest to ensure that eco-minded Land Rover owners are able to adventure in zero emissions comfort. It may only be one single charging point that we’ve installed, but we’re not expecting there to be much of a queue…”

Well, at least the photo editing wasn’t appalling…

Audi B-Tron

Again, this April fools’ joke feels like it’s just a promotion for their new electric line of cars that has been dressed up as some April fools’ content. The “B-Tron” is a sibling to the E-Tron with the main difference being that it’s yellow, has a cool graphic design and uses honey as fuel, as explained by Imker Honig (translating to Beekeeper Honey).

Imker commented “Early prototypes tended to attract scores of bees, typically around the hexagonal fuel cap,”

“One tester was swarmed by a hive that had settled in the glove compartment. I don’t think he’ll be doing that again, ha!”

“That said, everyone loves the on-board toaster,”

MG’s road-painting tyres

MG played on their existing slogan “colour the road” by taking it quite literally and revealing their new tyres with water-soluble dye on Monday.

Daniel Gregorious, Head of Sales and Marketing at MG, had this to say: “They say a picture paints a thousand words, but what about an entire road? Ten thousand? Twenty thousand? I don’t know for sure, but in the case of MG, I’m certain a lot of those words would be ‘value’, ‘quality’ and ‘reliability’.”

So if these are all bad, what makes a good April fools’ joke?

You may think we’re hard to please when it comes to good April fools’ jokes (we are) but we don’t scoff at all of them. For instance, Honda’s 90s interior makeover for their video Passport SUV was a great bit of April fools’ content.

It was high quality and clearly a lot of effort went into it. They made a real effort to make people laugh and it worked (for us, at least). That being said, we do have to deduct points for it not being very believable.

Another great example would be Skoda’s take on this year’s fools’ day.

ŠKODA Head of infotainment development, Dr Ivor Tüchskreen explained: “Every week, I forget to put my bins out for recycling. Before ProjectaPal, I would tape a note on the interior door handle, but it would always fall off. Then I thought ‘why don’t I ask my Karoq to remind me instead?’ – and that’s when we started designing ProjectaPal.”

ProjectPal allows motorists to customise the door’s light to either a custom message, like the one seen above, or to an image of a loved one such as the example below.

Let us know what your favourite and least favourite April fools’ jokes were this year in the comments and don’t forget to subscribe!