Black Eyed Peas frontman William “Will.I.Am” Adams is a certified car guy. But unlike most singers and producers who love cars, he also likes to build cars, or at least attempt to. He’s slapped his name on everything from a V8-powered Volkswagen Beetle to a unique DeLorean. Most recently, he was seen slapping a Mercedes G-Wagen-like face on an AMG GT 4-Door. Now, there’s one more Will.I.Am creation out there. Will.I.Am is teasing the Trinity, a complex $30,000 trike with Tron Lightcycle-like wheels, an AI “brain”, and a promise to fix inner cities with robotics. Oh yeah, it’s a classic Will.I.Am ambitious project!
The Trinity trike was actually unveiled at CES 2026 back in January. However, it seems that most major car news publications missed it or skipped it. The trike is in the news again, not because of car websites or even the Automotive News wire, but thanks to reporting from Reuters and Axios. It’s a shame, because car media has seemingly missed out on a very weird vehicle.
Like all projects from Will.I.Am (he actually prefers that his stage name be written in all lowercase), the Trinity cannot just be a car. On the surface, the Trinity looks like the lovechild of an Elio and a Tron Lightcycle with its wheels in the wrong places. But it’s more than that. Will.I.Am is promising to build new inner-city factories to produce the Trinity, where nearby colleges will also teach young adults about robotics. Oh yeah, this is going to be fun and weird, buckle up!
From Music To Tech
If this is somehow your first time hearing about Will.I.Am making a car, golly, you’re in for a ride.
Will.I.Am was a pretty big deal during the first 15 years or so of this century. He was one of the founding members of 1990s hitmakers Black Eyed Peas, which went on to produce some real bangers of albums. I grew up practically wearing out my Elephunk and Monkey Business Black Eyed Peas CDs. As a teenager with an iPod Touch, the Black Eyed Peas’ The E.N.D (The Energy Never Dies) album was full of my high school anthems.
The Black Eyed Peas hit their peak in the 2000s, and depending on who you ask, the group has moved anywhere between 50 million and 80 million records and singles over their existence. The Black Eyed Peas were a massively successful group in the 2000s and parts of the 2010s. They’re still active today, too, but don’t quite get the airtime they used to. Where Is The Love? (embedded below) remains one of my favorite tracks.
Anyway, when Will.I.Am isn’t singing and writing, he’s a prolific producer and has worked with everyone from Michael Jackson and Justin Timberlake to Miley Cyrus and Lady Gaga. Will.I.Am even launched his own label, signing on LMFAO, Kelis, Fergie, Macy Gray, and others under his wing. Basically, the man is a music industry icon, and his career has afforded him a life that many folks dream of.
Will.I.Am started getting involved in tech endeavors in the early 2010s, falling in love with the FIRST Robotics Competition in 2011. He’d soon embrace all kinds of tech from smartphones and 3D printers to machine learning and wearables. Will.I.Am even has his name on some tech designs, like Beats By Dre headphones.
A pretty awesome byproduct of this is Will.I.Am’s support for STEAM Education (Science, Technology, Engineering, the Arts, and Mathematics) and desire to prepare underprivileged youth for the future of tech and robotics. He has a whole organization to support the education of youth, the i.am/Angel Foundation, which you can read more about by clicking here.
Will.I.Am Keeps Trying To Build Cars
But not everything Will.I.Am has touched has been nearly as successful. Back in 2012, Will.I.Am appeared on Top Gear for the show’s Star in a Reasonably Priced Car segment. It was there that he talked about loving cars and future tech so much that he was going to start a futuristic techy car company. IAMAUTO unveiled its first car in January 2012 and, probably to Will.I.Am’s chagrin, it quickly became a laughingstock.
Our very own Matt Hardigree penned a blog titled “Will.I.Am Launches Crappy Car Company” for Jalopnik in 2012. What was so crappy about it? Well, Will.I.Am said that he built a $700,000 supercar from the ground up using “OEM parts from Chrysler” and containing a Beats by Dr. Dre stereo. This car was later found to be a DeLorean that was heavily modified by West Coast Customs.
It was disappointing even more because Will.I.Am pitched to produce the car as a vehicle to give jobs in the low-income neighborhood where he grew up. See, Will.I.Am didn’t just want to make a car company, but he wanted to do philanthropy through building weird cars. But IAMAUTO went nowhere.
Undeterred, Will.I.Am later appeared behind the wheel of a supposedly all-new custom car (video above) that took four years and $900,000 to build. This car was modified by The Garage in Stuart, FL, and was an old Volkswagen Beetle underneath, rather than a scratch build. But Will.I.Am pitched it as a STEM project, from TMZ:
I build the cars for a project that I’m doing in inner cities, where I round up a whole bunch of people that are qualified to teach kids science, technology, engineering and mathematics. And through the course, they build vehicles. So I have to build the vehicles that can be used in the tutorial.
In 2016, Will.I.Am was at it again, this time showing off a modified Tesla Model S (video above). So, despite Will.I.Am’s ambitions, IAMAUTO never actually became a real car manufacturer, and the cars that were slapped with the IAMAUTO label were one-off personal cars for Will.I.Am. Will.I.Am even had a bizarre custom Corvette in his fleet.
While it seems that Will.I.Am has given up on IAMAUTO, he’s still trying to sling really weird, futuristic cars. In 2022, he partnered with Mercedes-Benz to modify an AMG GT 4-Door into the WILL.I.AMG.
Weirdly, this car was refreshing because Will.I.Am wasn’t trying to pitch it as a whole new car company. We also know that the car was made to be auctioned off to fund 50 to 100 STEAM programs. That’s great!
Will.I.Am also found a way to capitalize on the COVID-19 pandemic by partnering up with Honeywell to make the $299 XUPERMASK. It was marketed as the world’s first “connected mask” with Bluetooth, three-speed fans, HEPA filters, active noise-cancelling audio, and a microphone. Amazingly, Will.I.Am wasn’t the only one who thought this was a good idea, as Dyson also made an equally ridiculous mask.
The Trinity
Well, now Will.I.Am is back into the automotive space again, and this time he’s dusting off his old idea of launching a whole car company. Behold the Trinity!
What is this thing? Well, it’s a trike, to start. But notice that it’s a standard trike rather than the superior reverse trike configuration. Reverse trikes like the Polaris Slingshot, the Can-Am Spyder, the Vanderhall Venice, the Morgan 3 Wheeler, and others are known for their stability thanks to having two wheels up front. They also tend to have better handling than standard trikes and usually carry less of a risk of tipping under extreme conditions.
Thankfully, the Trinity is not rigid, and it’s designed to lean into turns like a motorcycle and some other standard-style trikes. It’s not too different than trikes like the Carver. So, it should be stable enough. There’s also a self-balancing system onboard that was designed by DEKA Research & Development.
Will.I.Am doesn’t say what the slick body is made out of, but it definitely appears to be something like plastic or fiberglass. In the shots showing the door open, the futuristic vibe breaks, and you can see that the actual side windows are rudimentary, like the ones you’d find in a kit-built trike.
The drivetrain is fascinating. The Trinity is powered by a pair of Yasa P400R hub motors offering up 300 HP or 400 HP each at 400 volts or 600 volts, respectively. Trinity is projecting that its trike will have a total of 800 HP, 176 miles of range, a 60 mph acceleration time in 1.8 seconds, a top speed of 120 mph, and a charge time of 1.1 hours.
At the heart of the Trinity is its AI “brain,” which Will.I.Am says is using NVIDIA DGX Spark AI. Apparently, instead of using apps on an infotainment screen, you’re supposed to have a conversation with the AI in the vehicle to achieve tasks like navigation, send emails, and plot business strategies. Will.I.Am also sees the AI as being like your “workforce,” whatever that means. Oh, and you get all of that for the princely sum of $30,000.
Like Will.I.Am’s other car efforts, this one is supposed to help fix inner cities, from Axios:
Will.I.Am envisions Trinity helping revitalize inner cities. Manufacturing the vehicle in urban areas is just the start, he says, outlining a world in which nearby community colleges teach related robotics skills.
He even imagines that residents could contribute their own ideas that get turned into skills that the onboard agent can perform.
“How do we have our inner cities transform like Shenzhen was transformed during the mobile internet,” he said in an interview last month, where his Trinity prototype was parked prominently at the entrance to the San Jose Convention Center. “In the agentic internet, how does Watts change forever? How does Oakland change forever?”
Yes, the Trinity logo is similar to the Atari logo, but inverted.
The prototype Trinity is a real vehicle, and was built with DEKA and West Coast Customs. Will.I.Am’s goal is to have it built in inner cities and to use the vehicle to teach youth about tech, AI, and robotics. All of that is great! Honestly, no snark or joking, but Will.I.Am’s desire to teach generations of kids is awesome. I wish the world had more adults like that! It seems like he’s a genuinely great guy who wants to make the world a better place, and actually spends his money helping kids.
A Long Way To Go
But, as just about every failed car company can tell you, building cars is hard. It’s one thing to have West Coast Customs build a one-off; it’s an entirely different ballgame to build factories, marketing departments, engineering departments, sales departments, and to actually put real production vehicles on the road.
However, in building a trike, Will.I.Am will be skipping lots of regulatory red tape. He won’t have to be concerned about crash testing, complying with FMVSS for cars, or complying with EPA regulations for cars. Unless Congress has its way, this thing will be classified as a motorcycle, which makes reaching production easier. However, the fact that you cannot buy an Elio or an Aptera yet is proof that even getting a trike into production isn’t easy. That’s not even talking about the AI stuff that the Trinity will supposedly have.
Regardless, Will.I.Am says that he plans on putting hundreds of these on the road next year. As of now, Trinity exists as a Kickstarter campaign that hasn’t even started yet. Time will tell if Will.I.Am is successful this time, or, like with IAMAUTO, he learns the hard way that building an entire car company from scratch is a huge endeavor.
Story pics and top graphic image: Trinity
Christ, somebody just rip off Nobe’s design already and be done with it, it isn’t brain science
Well… At least he didn’t ruin another DeLorean, I guess.
gotta love all the tech vanity projects (looking at you hyper loop) that answer the question “we know people just need public transportation, but what if I got money instead?”
Too much power in a too tiny package. Recipe for disaster.
Since probably it won’t happen, this will not be a problem.
If these are ever real, they look like they should have maybe 40hp, not 400 or more. Yikes.
Fuck this clown. I can not stand him. Absolute hack that has used his status and money to get morons to accept his infantile ideas.
All you have to do in this country is “make it” in some way, shape, or form, for some brief amount of time, and your grift is assured for life.
Grifting has to be the word of the decade because everyone seems to be running a scam these days.
At the very least, most of the time, he only seems to scam himself, spending tons of cash on ideas that go nowhere.
$900,000 to modify an air-cooled Beetle into something that looks like a cheap kit car is just hilariously awful.
There are large companies who have hired this clown as an advisor, mostly for the press, to get his terrible perspective on things. It must be infuriating to work for Beats (Apple) as a professional designer knowing this no-talent clown is pulling in 10x your salary as a consultant while you have to ruin your design based on his terrible recommendations.
I hate everything about this guy.
Did he just say he spent that much, though? Not that I don’t believe he’s dumb enough to have done so, but he keeps trying to sell these rebodied vehicles as fully original ideas, which is a blatant lie, so maybe the number is, too, and he says it because he thinks it makes it sound like the kit car is a legit, from scratch vehicle, though I could have one of my original designs built from scratch for far less than $900k.
Yeah, I saw that build come together, it was the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever seen. The amount of design on the fly, change this and change that was just stupid. It’s like every day he has a new idea and wants to change it, along with his changing mood.
He needs to stay away from cars and vehicles. All his designs (which he didn’t do himself) are Steve Wonder editions.
I like it, but it looks like he just rebodied a Carver trike from the Netherlands. It’s certainly the least offensive car he’s ‘designed’ though..
https://www.moveelectric.com/e-cars/carver-electric-teams-top-ev-garage-three-wheeler-tests
Scrolled through to see if someone else recognized that it is a Carver. It absolutely has to be. He hasn’t done anything new yet, so why would he start now and with something more complicated than the rebodies that he also tried to sell as originals? Not that I have a problem with coachbuilding(?) or whatever adjacent thing he’s doing, but he sells these projects as something far more technical and involved than they very obviously are, so whatever positive goal might be behind this, it all sounds like vaporware BS. He also needs to have a compelling product or design and I’d say he’s achieved neither.
To his team’s credit, it looks better than a Carver
Speaking of Mercedes, he actually promoted the new Mercedes-Benz CLA EQ. Most of the time will.i.am promoting a thing means RUN AS FAR AWAY, OMG THIS IS GOING TO BE SO BAD. However this might be an exception to the rule. Quite possibly the turd in the music video was the FYI RAIDIO. The song was relatively decent though, 42 million views on YT isn’t too shabby for what is essentially a commercial. The CLA I’m quite happy with, however will.i.am promoting it was one of the biggest potential red flags I encountered.
It’s probably useless, but in the grand scheme of things that he could be using his celebrity and wealth for there are much worse things he could be doing. I’d hope that if I was a multimillionaire with plenty of free time I’d be doing something this inoffensive.
All of these designs are offensive
Oh, sure. But at least he’s just designing gopping cars instead of assisting in the destruction of the machinery of government and designing gopping cars. It could be worse.
This is the dumbest thing I’ve seen since last nite.
People need housing, healthcare and healthy food, not $30,000 trikes.
Especially since they’ll be able to commute almost for free on CyberTaxis traveling through Boring Company tunnels.
Pfft, that’s what the AI “employee” in the car is for!
Always (well… 98% of the time) enjoy your articles. Like I enjoyed this one.
ALSO: Do provide us an update on your wife’s vehicle of choice….
I’m just glad he’s keeping busy with all that Black Eyed Peas moneys.
I hope he stays busy enough that they don’t have a reunion.
So you don’t want them to get it started in here?
I’ve heard this kind of thing from him more than once and while I love everything he’s saying, his history just tells me he should be called won’t.u.not.
Some notes, will:
1) Atari will light you absolutely on fire. Turning it upside down won’t be enough, that logo will make the future happen right now and teleport you directly to trademark infringement lawsuit proceedings.
2) $30k is too much to get only two seats and three wheels. People are working hard to scrape together cash and for a lot less than $30,000 they can have more seats, more doors, less silly. All the major automakers offer good cars, brand new, that come in at a lower price with more to offer.
3) The inner city + Electric is not an automatic homerun because infrastructure. I love the idea because I really hate the noise cars make, especially just sitting at a light, not moving. But again, the established players offer good choices already that bring more to the table for less money – except power. You can’t have a 400hp Bolt. But when it comes time to plug it in, what do you do? Run an extension cord across the sidewalk? That won’t fly.
4) Cars don’t fix the inner city, AI doesn’t fix the inner city. It’s cool if you want to build cars, but have a clearer vision of what effect that’s going to have. But building them in town, bringing jobs right to where people work, that fixes the inner city. You’ve been pitching this very idea for a long time – I remember when you pitched it to Jeremy Clarkson on Top Gear when he wasn’t known for being a dick that punched the catering guy – and I’m still waiting. C’mon, man, make it happen.
And no need to get a motorcycle license. This is a product with near-zero audience.
He keeps saying he’s doing all these things to bring jobs to inner cities and to teach kids high tech stuff, but then the company inevitably flops and goes nowhere…and then he makes another? So he’s kinda the Will.I.Am who cried wolf at this point.
will.i.cried.wolf
That Will.I.Am (sigh) appearance on Top Gear was maximum-level cringe. Clarkson fawning all over the Big American Celebrity. The Big American Celebrity who looked like he wanted to be literally anywhere else on the planet than sitting on a nasty couch in a drafty hangar on an old airfield in England. The picture of the obvious custom DeLorean and Clarkson fawning over it. It’s great that W.I.A. (that’s better) wants to (somehow) help inner-city and urban youth and produce vehicles in these communities, but somehow I don’t think a $30k electric trike that you have to have a conversation with in order to change up your playlist when “I Gotta Feeling” comes on is a viable solution.
Everytime you design a “Tron” cycle, could it at least be as cool as the one that was actually made 42 years ago?
Three wheels are for mobility scooters and Reliant Robins 🙁
(Two in the front one in the back Morgan/Heinkel style is a little better)
Bringing jobs somewhere – and a DeLorean.. Is it also financed by a bad coke deal? 😀
What was the name of that strange Toyota with the Anglia/Ami/Monterey rear window? Has it got something to with that guy too?
–Oh here it is.. Pretty close name 🙂
$30,000? This thing is absurdly expensive.
Why not target something velomobile-sized, with less weight, and greatly less power for the same performance? Get rid of all of the AI crap while you’re at it. With mass production, you could target a 4-digit price tag. For a limited utility vehicle, that is much more realistic, and at a price point to where it has potential to catch on.
Not the worst idea I’ve seen, but it needs some work.
Having AI control my 800 hp electric trike sounds like an absolute nightmare. Will.i.am clearly hasn’t seen Ex-Driver
I so often what to reference EX-Driver in self driving car debates but no one I have ever met knows what the hell I’m on about. This comment made my day …..
It was a show ahead of its time. I watched it long before anyone ever started talking about Full Self Driving
That cartoon made me want an Lotus Europa right up until I sat in a real one….. Still want a super 7 and have given up on a Stratos.
Damn, for a moment I thought it was the company Singer.
Will.i.am also wants to keep testing out fraud legislation, it seems.
Well, I give him credit on his continued persistence to build these cars. That’s about it.
WIll’s created a DeLorean, but kinda worse…
Now he’s working on a TRON Reliant Robin. That should go over well.
Not quite sure how to react to this. The headline could have been B-list celebrity crackpot designs a ridiculous vehicle doomed to failure. I’m guessing less people might have read that article, though.
This thing is ridiculous AND his previous efforts have been failures. Why are we taking him seriously? If this is an April Fools joke, you’re a day late.
Okay so I now know how I should react to this vehicle:
Will.I.Am.Not.Impressed
I don’t expect this to go anywhere! I’m just amazed that he keeps trying. You’d think that after failing three (?) times he’d get the message that one does not simply make a car company.
Some messages take more time to arrive to people with deep pockets.
I genuinely think it is cool that he does this as a hobby. Crackpot ideas made for fun can be cool.
I don’t like that he and others have delusions this is actually going to be a real product people buy, though. It also doesn’t sit well with me that he frames this as a solution to help others. I don’t like celebrities (or regular people, for that matter) confusing their hobbies with altruism. I also find the AI stuff silly.
If anyone ever tries to tell you our society is a meritocracy ask them to explain Will.I.Am
Goddamn, I felt the heat from that one all the way over here. lol
I…I… No notes. Perfect.
It’s a shame because the man has legitimately good intentions and admirable ambitions, but… he really, REALLY needs a team of people with business and engineering accumen to steer him in the right direction.
His forte is creating sick beats, not wheels meant for the streets.
We all need someone who’s willing to look us dead in the eyes and say “no, you’re making as ass of yourself”. It’s abundantly clear he’s never had one of those people.
Start a list of guys who need that treatment and Will.i.am isn’t in the top 1000.
Does he though? All I know is what intentions he says he has and that doesn’t align with reality. He’s not a fresh-faced 25 year old. He’s 51, he should honestly know how things work. He has enough failed crap he’s released that I don’t find him trustworthy in the slightest.
Sick beats wasn’t his “forte” either
The best “beat” in a Black Eyed Peas song is literally just a copy and pasted Dick Dale song that they sing and rap over lol
Well there is the concept that a rising tide lifts all boats. william is a dinghy on a pond getting a hell of a rain storm.