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ELECTION fever is well under way in the UK, with just days to go before the PM calls the next election.

BMW has thus pulled a smart one – by allowing customers to ‘show their true colours’ by colour-coding their cars’ BMW Roundel.

The Political Roundel Attachment Tag comes in 3 prime colours – red for Labour, blue for Conservative, yellow for Liberal Democrats. This allows alignment with the major UK political parties.

Ahem. It is, of course, an April Fool’s joke. There is no Uwe Beanhadde, and no renowned BMW Forschungs und Innovationszentrum centre in Munich (Ding! Actually, there is! But we Brits, with our ‘mastery’ of languages, only know it as FIZ…). He has not ‘been working on this innovation for a number of years,’ and does not ‘see it as a niche with potentially wide appeal.’

But, heavens, isn’t it genius all the same? The car maker April Fool’s joke press release is something of a tradition in the UK, and the traditional masters of it are BMW. The firm even takes out national press adverts. Other firms are getting in on the act, but some have a long way to go.

Not least because the innovation cannot, err, ‘be replaced in a matter of seconds should the opposition suddenly seem more appealing’. Someone’s thought about this, for sure. Even the acronym is canny…

It’s well worth checking out other BMW April Fool’s ads over the years, too.

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