2010 Subaru Forester X Limited Wagon 4-door 2.5l on 2040-cars

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Automotive April Fools' joke roundup [w/videos]

Happy April, everyone. And we all know what this first day of the month means: April Fools' Day. Today is a national holiday for pranksters with the Internet acting as a serious enabler, and it's always fun to see what kind of vivid imaginations exist out there in the automotive world. The abundance of fake news gets a little old as the day rolls on, but we did manage to get in a few chuckles thanks to a handful of major automakers and automotive news outlets that got into the pranking spirit this year
Some of our favorites this year includes Subaru showing what happens when you combine a bunch of rumors, a Corvette some may have already thought was a joke or Honda providing some in-car innovation circa the late 1980s. Honestly, we're still waiting for official confirmation from Mitsubishi that the recently introduced 2014 Mirage is an elaborate April Fools' joke using a failed design intended for the 1995 Geo Metro. We dug up as much "official" OEM foolishness we could find, as well as some of our other favorites, and posted them all below.

2015 Subaru Legacy

Subaru has a problem on its six-starred hands, but you wouldn't know it at first glance. Sales are up; in fact, the Japanese automaker has recorded 28-straight months of increased sales in the United States, leading to the best first-quarter Subaru has ever recorded, and 2014 will almost assuredly be the seventh straight year it has posted improvements. So, what's wrong? The answer is simple, though clearly complicated to resolve. Sedans - specifically, midsize examples - have proven a tough nut for Subaru to crack.
The vast majority of those impressive sales statistics have come from just a few models, namely the Forester, Outback and XV Crosstrek. The Impreza continues to sell at a respectable pace, but it's telling that the XV, after just three years on the market, is already Subaru's third-best-selling nameplate, outpacing the aforementioned Impreza (on which it's based), its high-performance WRX sibling and the Legacy, which is now entering its sixth generation, having been first introduced way back in 1989. It's that last model we're examining today.
Despite the fact that the Legacy plays in a hotly contested market segment that includes such stalwart sales champions as the Toyota Camry, Honda Accord, Ford Fusion and Nissan Altima, Subaru's competitor registers as a barely visible blip on the radars of new-car buyers. Graphically illustrated another way, Toyota sells 17 Camry sedans for every new Legacy that Subaru moves.

Subaru revisits 1998 Impreza 22B STI

It was 1998 when Subaru made some crucial changes to its World Rally Championship Impreza, such as increasing the displacement of the turbocharged flat-four-cylinder engine from 2.0 to 2.2 liters and fitting wide fender flares. Subaru won the WRC manufacturer championship with the car that year, and it also was the year of the automaker's 40th anniversary. To celebrate the milestone, the company came out with this limited-edition, road-going Impreza, the hallowed 22B STI, which looked nearly identical to the rally car.
Only 424 22Bs were built, and most of them stayed in Japan. But Dominick Infante, national manager of product communications at Subaru of America, was able to secure a drive in one of the only two 22Bs in the US. He details the car's history and some of the design and engineering cues that made the Impreza STI so popular both in motorsport and on the street, but we were caught up listening to the exhaust and admiring the timeless blue-and-gold paint. You should too, so head below to watch the video.