--- title: April Fools' Day Twist Awards NZ Woman Brand-New BMW description: The license plate reads "NoFooL" canonical: https://time.com/3766857/april-fools-bmw-car/ author: Nolan Feeney article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2015-04-01T13:36:50.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-08-04T07:48:32.007Z og:title: No Joke: A Woman Got a $50,000 Car Thanks to an April Fools' Day Twist og:description: The license plate reads "NoFooL" og:url: https://time.com/3766857/april-fools-bmw-car/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltde093bcdab65f2d0/6988d9b9bc6cfc69913e2a3c/time-logo.jpg?branch=production og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 675 og:image:alt: TIME og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: No Joke: A Woman Got a $50,000 Car Thanks to an April Fools' Day Twist twitter:description: The license plate reads "NoFooL" twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltde093bcdab65f2d0/6988d9b9bc6cfc69913e2a3c/time-logo.jpg?branch=production --- # No Joke: This Woman Got a $50,000 Car Thanks to an April Fools' Day Twist > Sponsored content. 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Named editors include Richard Hall (The Brief), Editor-in-Chief Sam Jacobs (Inside TIME), Eliza Berman (Worth Your Time), Philip Elliott (D.C. Brief), Justin Worland (Future Proof) and Harry Booth (In the Loop). Health Matters is written by TIME's health desk. #### How do I sign up for a TIME newsletter? Go to time.com/newsletters, choose the newsletters you want and enter your email address. There is no cost and no subscription requirement. ### Sources * TIME Newsletters: [time.com/newsletters](/c/time-nl-network-2026q3/newsletters?i=d4d20027-ec11-4b4b-bba3-cf5317a54502&cr=time-nl-network-2026q3-v1) ## Video: Driverless Cars: The Future of Driving [Watch (HLS stream): Driverless Cars: The Future of Driving](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/uDXtGW1i.m3u8) (4:57)  _Published 2014-05-06. Predictions about a future in which cars that will drive themselves have been staples of everything from science fiction to pop culture to corporate PR for decades. But now it looks like driverless cars, at least, may finally be hitting the road._  by [Nolan Feeney](https://time.com/author/nolan-feeney/)  ## Nolan Feeney Apr 1, 2015 1:36 PM UTC  by [Nolan Feeney](https://time.com/author/nolan-feeney/)  ## Nolan Feeney Apr 1, 2015 1:36 PM UTC Being skeptical [doesn’t always pay off](http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c%5Fid=1&objectid=11426501) on April Fools’ Day. Just ask Tianna Marsh, who traded her 15-year-old Nissan Avenir for a new BMW worth $50,000 when she answered an ad that many New Zealanders dismissed as a joke. A BMW dealership put a front-page ad on the _New Zealand Herald_ offering a new car to the first person who showed up on April 1 with their current vehicle and the coupon. When Marsh arrived at 5:30 a.m., she asked for an employee named “Tom,” per the ad’s instructions, and quickly said hello to a new ride with the license plate NoFooL. “The ad was intentionally vague and definitely appeared too good to be true, but in this case we wanted to turn the tables and reward the first person who was willing to take the chance,” said Ed Finn, a spokesperson for BMW. The company will donate the money made from selling Marsh’s old Nissan to charity, and it also plans to upload video footage of Marsh claiming her prize to prove to skeptics it wasn’t a publicity stunt. The dealership hired security guards in the event of riotous crowds, but according to the company, few took the bait. \[[_New Zealand Herald_](http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c%5Fid=1&objectid=11426501)\] ## Transcript On Star will now disengage automatic drive. Are you ready? Yes. Imagine being the perfect driver. You never got drowsy. You never took your eyes off the road. You could see 360 degrees around you, and you never got drunk. That's the promise of driverless car technology. And it's closer than you think. [ MUSIC ]. We weren't always that close. We've been talking about driverless cars since the 1930s. And back then, everyone thought we'd definitely be in driverless cars by the 1960s. Safe distance between cars is maintained by automatic radio control. In the world of tomorrow. Well done Firebird two, you're now under automatic control, hands off steering. [ MUSIC ]. How we missed that window by a good 40 or 50 years, but today we're closer than we've ever been before. Here we go guys. [ MUSIC ]. The fuse was really lit by Darpa in 2004, with the Darpa Grand Car Challenge, it was a contest to find technology, that the military could use for driverless vehicles. It was a race through the desert, at top speeds, with out crashing, and guess what? In 2004, there were no wins. Okay we have [ INAUDIBLE ] on its side. [ MUSIC ]. It wasn't until 2005, that Darpa Grand Car Challenge again, through the desert, as quickly as possible, without crashing. There was a first- place winner. I saw the concept first in the Darpa Grand Challenges. So we decided at Stanford to build a different selfdriving car, and the unimaginable happened. It became the first car. To ever return from a Darpa Grand Challenge challenge. So Google had lured away that guy Sebastian you just saw, to work on Google's driverless car technology. We've driven in cities, mountain roads, day and night, and even Lombard Street in San Francisco. We've driven 140, 000 miles. People didn't even notice. [ MUSIC ] As for how Google's driverless car works, it's a mixture of laser sensors, radar, cameras and GPS. The real secret sauce though, is the laser sensor on top of the car, which captures a 360 degree image, and millions of data points every second. The reason the laser is so important, is the GPS isn't quite reliable enough. GPS can't detect objects in front of you, it can't draw a map around you, as you drive like the laser can. You think Google maps is impressive, wait till you see the maps that are produced by a bunch of Google driverless cars, going around the city. There's also a camera mounted underneath the rear view mirror, that leverages image recognition programs, to help the car read signs, traffic lights, and other elements in the driving environment. Also to help detect objects are four radars, three mounted on the front of the car, and one on the back. Our sensors spot the orange signs and cones early, to alert the car of the lane blockage ahead, and we can change lanes safely. There's also an ultrasonic sensor called a position [ INAUDIBLE ] that works along with the GPS to help this car's mapping position. So all this imagery is being captured, all this data is being collected, and that's great, but it means nothing without sophisticated software to make sense of it all. That's where you're gonna start to see differentiation amongst people like Google, and Ford, and Audi, and all the different car companies. All the hardware is relatively similar for each of these solutions. The software is what's gonna make the difference. The thing about driverless cars, is that they need to be adaptive. What happens if it snows? What happens if it starts raining? What happens if someone darts out in front of the car? These cars need to be able to adjust themselves on the fly. So now what you'll see is our vehicle at a busy intersection. The red and green fences indicate that the car will stop and wait until a path is clear. We even detect the cyclist approaching from behind, and wait until they pass. Whether you know it or not, there's already plenty of driverless car technology all around you. You have cars that can parallel park themselves, cars that'll help you stay in your lane, cars that'll warn you if you're about to hit something, cars that'll actually break for you if you're about to hit something, and then cars that can actually valet park themselves. Take a company like Valeo that's working on cars that park themselves, picture this, you pull up to Costco, you get out of your car, you go right into the store, and the car goes and finds a parking spot in the parking lot. That's the eventual promise. The technology is still on its early stages, but that's coming in the not too distant future. [ MUSIC ] So what's the future of driverless car technology? Will we ever have fully driverless cars? The answer is, yes. It's gonna happen. Just embrace it. You're not gonna have to embrace it for a while, though. People wanna drive cars. People don't trust. Driverless cars yet. An unmanned car driven by a search engine company, we've seen that movie. It ends with robots harvesting our bodies for energy. There's a lot of legal issue we've gotta get through. The first time there's an accident with one of these driverless cars, it's gonna cause a whole mess. There's gonna be a media firestorm. Politicians are gonna get involved. Right now, it is against the law for a vehicle to be on the roadway without a human being driving it. People are gonna be saying, what's to be done about these driverless cars? That's why we're easing into it right now, it may not happen overnight, may not happen in a decade, may not happen in 25 years. 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