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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.

Jalopnik and Consumer Reports see who can pull off the best snow drift

The weather throughout much of the United States is pretty awful at the moment with some combination of extremely low temperatures, inches of snow and maybe some ice underneath it all. The folks at Jalopnik and Consumer Reports are making the absolute best out of a difficult situation by heading to CR's snow-covered test track and attempting to make the longest drift in a quartet of very different performance vehicles. Jalopnik brought along a Mercedes-Benz E63 AMG S Wagon, a Subaru WRX STI, a BMW 228i and a 1973 Volkswagen Baja Bug (heck yeah!) for the challenge. Also, the track was perfect for this group, with a mix of packed snow in places and still a few inches of unsullied powder in spots too. Ostensibly the goal was to get the tail to step out through a particular corner, but in reality this was more about having hilarious fun in the snow with fast cars. The result just looks like the best time humanly possible in this weather.

Subaru takes another look back, this time at the 2004 WRX STI

Here we have the followup to the rally-mimicking Impreza 22B STI that Subaru recently chronicled in its Vintage Garage series: the 2004 Impreza WRX STI. Displacement for the boxer four was upped from 2.2 liters to 2.5, and after noticing how many buyers had installed larger turbochargers on their WRXs, Subaru decided to bolt on one in-house. That gave the final product 300 horsepower and a 0-to-60 mile-per-hour run of just 4.6 seconds.
It was stiffer, it's body from nose to front doors was penned by Peter Stephens, he of the McLaren F1, it came with a driver-controlled center differential, driver-activated cooling spray for the turbos and 300 pound-feet of torque. This is a curio from a time when, after a new WRX STI came out, you started poring through magazines to see how the Mitubishi Evo was going to respond. You can find out more about it in the video below.