Dan Thompson, who owns Tomson Motor in Edinburgh, had to apologise after receiving a visit from the police, BBC reports.
Mr Thompson lay in the road pretending to be dead while a colleague stood over him with a pick axe handle after spotting the Google camera car nearby.
He told the BBC Scotland news website: "By complete fluke I saw the Google car coming along the road but it had to loop the block so I had one minute to rush back inside the garage and set up the murder scene.
The incident happened in August 2012 but it was not until a year later, once the pictures had been uploaded onto the Google site, that police were alerted, after a web user saw the image and made a complaint.
"We had forgotten about it when the police arrived a year later and we apologised for wasting police time. They found it funny."