Punked, we've been punked! And that's OK. In the high powered, fast paced deeply sexy world of car blogging, mistakes are going to be made. And every once in a while a group of mayhem minded jokers can easily gum up the gears of the machine by providing an elaborate prank as grist for mill. Such is the case with a certain Porsche Cayman Shooting Brake, cooked up by the former editor of TopGear.com, Jared Holstein as a parting gift.

The New York Times is reporting that while Holstein thought up the viral plan, the execution was left up to summer interns. One intern, a digital design student named Matt DuVall, carried out the design using Maya, a high powered 3d rendering program used to make movies like Ice Age. Under Holstein's direction, DuVull used as many Porsche design themes as possible, including lots of cues from the Panamera, Porsche development wheels, a Porsche mule lookalike bumper and even the same license plate used on Porsche mules. Then they rendered the "car" in HD, added it to a clip of an alley in Brooklyn, degraded it's quality and added Italian music to make it seem as if some kids captured the shooting brake mule on their phone somewhere in Europe. So, so sneaky. If you haven't seen it yet, we've included the original video after the jump.

Then came our part. Another intern, John Masters (who is getting his masters in media studies) began sending links to car sites. Sites like Autoblog! Masters then created what looked like a screen shot from the highly anticipated (and blogged about) Forza Motorsport 3 and dropped it into a Czech Forza Forum and wrote in Czech to "add a layer of deception and plausibility." Sneaky, sneaky. We of course, ate it up. More than once. In our defense, we did punctuate every headline with a question mark. Still, joke's on us, and the rest of the automotive press. They totally got us.

Why'd they do it? Says Holstein, "Eh, there wasn't any cruel intention... we manifested an automotive Liger because... it was fun to do. That said, if Porsche actually built it, I'd start stripping at bachelorette parties (again) to afford one." He's right, a Cayman Shooting Brake would be incredibly sweet. One more thing. If you pause the video at the 9 second mark, you can see part of a little white Stig helmet poking out from the rear hatch. We're so spitting in Jared's food next auto show. OG video after the jump.

[Source: NYT | Image: Matthew DuVall]