The Leko - a new car from IKEA?

A new site claims IKEA is about to launch a car - on the 1st April!

The latest silly site to go (semi) viral online this week purports to be teasing a new car from IKEA, that hell of a flat-pack, windowless, clockless shopping experience where the only instructions you get for assembling your insane purchase are a set of pictures on a big sheet of paper, that seemingly have no resemblance to the contents of the package you’ve been stupefied in to buying.

Now on the face of it this is perhaps plausible. After all, the car market is changing massively, and cars are starting to get so small (Tata Nano for example) that you could almost imagine picking up a flat-pack version and slinging it in the back of your now worthless SUV to take home and assemble. And Gordon Murray, with his T25, has made it clear that he is selling the concept for manufacture by others. So why not IKEA?

Well, it is remotely possible, I suppose. But the biggest clue is a look at the site and the guy behind it. The countdown to launch on the site ends on 1st April – well there’s a surprise. A bit of a peek at the server it’s hosted on reveals another site purporting to sell tickets for a competition at €50 a pop to win a holiday, and the man registered as the domain owner seems to be associated with a number of off-the-wall publicity stunts. So it all seems designed to get a heap of publicity and links for the site. Which, as is the way with the web, can be redirected to another site later to benefit from the publicity generated by the prank.

Still, we’ll play the game – the link to the site is here.

Thanks to everyone for the tip!