All The News That's Fit To Make Up

From the AP today:

TOKYO – Toyota Motor Corp. is secretly developing a vehicle that will be powered solely by solar energy in an effort to turn around its struggling business with a futuristic ecological car, a top business daily reported Thursday.

The Nikkei newspaper, however, said it will be years before the planned vehicle will be available on the market. Toyota's offices were closed Thursday and officials were not immediately available for comment.

According to The Nikkei, Toyota is working on an electric vehicle that will get some of its power from solar cells equipped on the vehicle, and that can be recharged with electricity generated from solar panels on the roofs of homes. The automaker later hopes to develop a model totally powered by solar cells on the vehicle, the newspaper said without citing sources.

The solar car is part of efforts by Japan's top automaker to grow during hard times, The Nikkei said.

Pretty cool, and since Toyota is incorporating solar cells into the moonroofs of the next generation Prius, it sounds pretty plausible, too. There's only one problem. It's not true. Or, at least, the Nikkei story quoted by Yuri Kageyama doesn't exist:

AP names today’s Nikkei as the source. The funny thing is, there is no such article in today’s Nikkei, nor is there one that was published in previous days. A search of both the Japanese and English versions of the Nikkei for “Toyota” and “solar” comes up with nothing. The car doesn’t exist. The Nikkei article quoted by the AP doesn’t exist either...a case of too much sake last night for Yuri Kageyama-san, who wrote the article for AP?

As of right now, Google shows 270,000 hits for Toyota Developing Solar Powered Car. Made-up news sure gets around fast, doesn't it?