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