Update: New footage has come to The Drive’s attention depicting the aftermath of the crash. showing a crashed chrome Lamborghini Murcielago on the side of the road. It seems likely that a Lamborghini did, indeed, crash in Russia; however, the video depicting this event remains of dubious origins and quality. It’s possible the mirror finish on the car caused an odd optical illusion that made it look fake; it’s possible someone rendered the accident in CGI after the fact. For now, we’re upgrading the video from “totally bogus” to “possible but fishy.”
Somehow, people across the Internet appear to be falling for what seems to be a fake video that purports to show a Lamborghini crashing on a highway in a rainstorm in Russia. And we at The Drive, collectively, have no idea why.
As far as we can tell, the fake Lamborghini crash video started gaining traction on the Internet earlier today, when three British tabloids, The Mirror, The Sun,and The Daily Mail, picked up the story as part of their drift net-like efforts to suck up every bit of viral content out there. Each of the tabloids used almost identical language to describe the accident, which they all but certainly copied and pasted from the same place. They all misidentified the car, which clearly resembles a Lamborghini Murcielago, as “a 200-mph Huracan.”They even go on to cite the same quote from an unnamed Russian police spokesperson: “The 30-year-old Lamborghini driver was responsible for the situation. He was driving at high speed on the wet tarmac and lost control. The investigation continues.”
Then automotive outlets jumped in on it. Autoblog added a quick story on it. So did autoevolution. It’s only a matter of time before the rest of the online car-o-sphere passes it around like an embarrassing mash note amongst a class of third-graders.
But anyone with a pair of working eyes and a halfway-functional brain should be able to tell at a glance that the crashing Lamborghini in this video is about as real as those blue dudes in Avatar. Actually, that’s giving the creators of this crash clip way too much credit; the CGI Lamborghini is about as realistic as the sharks in Deep Blue Sea.
And the rest of the details don’t line up, either. The latitude and longitude listed on the dash cam’s data feed are, indeed, in Russia—but a quick Google Street View check proves the real location looks nothing like the stretch of highway in the video. And the weather in Moscow on July 6 was sunny, not rainy.
Yet news outlets across the globe are presenting this as fact. Are our fellow journalists just so hungry, so desperate for quick viral hits that they’re not even stopping to watch videos nowadays, let alone do the tiniest bit of fact-checking? Or are some of them really just that gullible
