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Comment by mmmmmbop | Hacker News Reader

I'm seriously confused by the backlash to the Voltswagen stunt. The first thing I thought when I read the headline was that this was obviously an early April fool's day joke.

Perhaps people are just upset that they didn't get it and are blaming Volkswagen to avoid admitting that they were a bit too gullible around April 1st.

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It's because it was not released on April fools.

I saw it as trying to get ahead of the news cycle - like how Burger King announced their prank that everything would be served on sourdough bread on March 31 instead of day-of.

VW's main mistake is that their joke was something some people actually really liked. It burns a ton of goodwill. Many of their supporters may have even defended the idea. Now VW effectively told their supporters that VW thinks they are idiots.

Their mistake was probably to hit “Send” by mistake 1 day too early in their PR machine.

I doubt it was a mistake. 1. some timezones were probably already on April 1, 2. better get it out first so it doesn't get lost in the other hundreds of lame corporate April 1 pranks.

I don't see how people could believe it's real though. VW is such a big company. how can people think they would rename to such a silly name.

Checked when it came out and it was definitely still the 31st across the world; it was the 30th in my timezone!

It was 30 in US, 31st in the rest.

> VW thinks they are idiots

They hardly have a monopoly on that opinion. Just lemon juice on the wound though, I suppose. Getting mad and indignant about it qualifies as "continuing to dig", violating the first rule of what one should do upon finding themselves in an undesirable hole.

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