The joy of the automobile is in the harmony of form and function—or, in the case of our old pal the Black Eyed Peas’ Will.i.am, to just stick a bunch of fake vents and other junk on a Tesla and call it a day.
This is the very first we’re seeing of Will.i.am’s newest automotive creation, a product under his charitable IAmAuto customization brand that brought us the most, er, distinctive DeLorean we’ve ever witnessed:
Since this is just a carspotting video that we happened to see on Road & Track, we don’t have any official specs for the creation. We don’t know if Will.i.am hacked his Tesla with Chevy Volt parts for extra power output. (That’s what all the cool EV modifiers do.) We don’t know if he modified his differentials to have left-wheel drive. Thanks to some serious window tint, we don’t know if he removed all of the seats and changed the interior into a grass-lined ecoscape of sustainable wonder.
All we can gather is that this is a gigantic electric car with a huge widebody kit, suicide doors, and the biggest fake air intake I have ever seen on a car.
The thing about this vehicle is that every modification has the form of something fast and racey. The car is extra low, the wheels are extra big, the body is extra wide, and there’s that huge air intake and other assorted vents peppered around the body.
And these are all design traits that you might see on a midengined prototype race car.
But this is not a midengined prototype race car. It’s a fat sedan with no engine at all.
I cannot hate this car, I have to say. I kind of like the styling direction, and I really love that Will.i.am decided to customize his own car rather than just, I don’t know, put another boring stock Bentley on the road. I should not discourage people from fostering their own automotive visions and I should definitely not discourage people from actually going out and building them.
But this is what’s wrong with form over function. Cool as this vehicle might look, it has done nothing but make the Tesla engineering underneath worse. It’s kind of stupid, but at least it’s fun.