When you want something to be true desperately enough, it can be hard to give up hope. Doubly so in this age of social media, when some rumors are just so spicy that people refuse to stop peddling them, even when they’re obviously false. One such rumor is construction equipment manufacturer Caterpillar’s supposed foray into the white-hot market of consumer pickup trucks. It’s not happening, but that hasn’t stopped the TikTokers, nor the articles on popular news hubs that thousands of people read every day. Let’s put this one to bed, shall we?
Far as we can tell, the hoax started sometime in May on TikTok, with a number of posts all showing the same full-size truck aping the design of the Ford F-150 clad in Caterpillar’s trademark yellow. It’s not hard to pick out the flaws; besides the fact that the whole thing looks ridiculous and, again, is stealing F-150 design elements, the garbled text on the badges immediately gives away that the vehicle was created with generative AI. Looking even closer, a watermark that reads “Garagem Master” appears on many of these images. As you’d figure, it leads to the truck’s creator.
@mgnewsbr CATERPILLAR 2025 Quem mais quer uma dessa para seu sítio deixa uma curtida #agro #agroboy #agroetop #bolsonaro #goias #minasgerais ♬ Montagem Rave Eterno – Dj Samir & Fyex
Turns out, Garagem Master is one of those websites that deals in pictures of AI-built atrocities like Toyota Corolla Pickups, Honda Civic Convertibles, and, amusingly enough, multiple revivals of the Chevrolet Opala. These self-described “concepts” form the bulk of the site’s content, though every now and then, it does cover a real car. (Perhaps unsurprisingly, much of the time they tend to be Cybertrucks.)
Anyway, images of our Cat Pickup here first hit Garagem Master’s website on April 26 of this year. Titled an “automotive masterpiece” as well as a “futuristic vision that transcends the imaginable,” several pictures of the fake truck appear in the article, and a few of them are clearly the same images but mirrored. Badges on the tailgate suggest the truck that’ll leave Detroit shaking in its work boots will be called the “SNKE” or perhaps the “CNNAKE,” while Caterpillar’s abbreviated logo now reads “CACT” or “CATER” or even “CIA.”
These are the pictures that appear to have fueled the earliest social media traffic—but naturally, TikTok took that ball and ran like hell with it. Scanning the results that appear when you search “caterpillar pickup” on TikTok, sometimes the mythical truck looks like a Ford, other times a Chevy. But that’s par for the course for gen AI, which can only create a version of things it’s seen before.
@marcochavezz.pasion_cat Belleza caterpillar! #pasion_cat #operadoresdemaquinariapesada #operadoresdemaquinas #imagenesconinteligenciaartificial #inteligenciaartificial #IA #camionetas4x4 ♬ original sound – funny.mey – funny.mey19
After a whole summer incubating on the most viral of modern social media platforms, the hoax was syndicated by MSN from a publisher known as TORK US, which has posted at least two separate articles about the fake truck over four days. The earlier story leaves no ambiguity that Caterpillar is “entering the pickup truck market with their new 2025 model,” while Tork evidently chose to walk that back with its more recent bulletin, writing that “it’s important to note that this is still just speculation” in an article titled “Will It Be Real? New CAT Truck Rumors Explained.”
Of course, it won’t be real, and it was never going to be. Our friends at SlashGear add that tall tales of the Cat Snake Truck have migrated to YouTube, too. Personally, I don’t log onto Facebook at all these days except for work reasons, but I can only imagine this seemingly immortal rumor’s crept into truck groups and the like on that platform as well. It’s all inevitable, living through this era of early AI where people can invent whatever they want, but the public’s literacy to suss out real from fake hasn’t matured yet.
Believe me: Should the day ever come when Caterpillar gets into the passenger truck game, you’ll hear about it before you see it. And if you do see it, the company will probably have the sense to spell its own brand name right.
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