The Future of Cars: T-Pain Test Drives the BMW 335d Clean Diesel

The Artist: T-Pain
The Car: BMW 335d Clean Diesel
The Location: Miami, FL

Few things make T-Pain as happy as a strip club. The 26-year-old is in Miami recording his next album, Revolver, because this is where he makes his best music and, he says, "I think it's the strip clubs." The first single, "Take Your Shirt Off," is perfectly engineered for four-minute pole dances. "Every song is!" he yells, and then cackles, as T-Pain often does.

For two months, he's been here, recording in the studio next door to his friend Lil Wayne, and commuting back and forth to his condo in one of the five cars he shipped down from Atlanta. Today's ride was a 2009 Rolls-Royce Phantom — the first Phantom sold in North America, which he bought for $500,000 from a dude who paid $2 million for it. "It's so smooth you could fall asleep sitting in the trunk."

It's been a good few years for T-Pain. Despite having no record of his own, he appeared as a guest on 37 songs last year and has become so defined for his pioneering use of Auto-Tune that Time ,agazine named him the 34th most influential person in the world last year and in August he released an Auto-Tune iPhone app that quickly shot to number-one most downloaded and gave him more money to spend on cars.

At last count, T-Pain had 32 cars at home, including a tricked-out Cadillac hearse, numerous vintage Impalas and the high-powered golf cart equipped with 22-inch wheels that he crashed last spring, losing several teeth and ending up in surgery. "That's the only crash I've ever had, and it was in something with no airbags," he says. "It sucked."

He takes a look at the power blue BMW he'll be driving to the beach today and says he recently bought his wife a 650, "so I like BMWs." This is the first-ever clean diesel BMW has imported to the U.S, a car that gets nearly 40 miles-per-gallon, emits cleaner exhaust than a gas car and that — at least for now — is the car the Bavarians are pushing as their green alternative, at least until another technology is better established.

Next: T-Pain on how
he'd trick out the BMW 335d Clean Diesel