Grammy-winning rapper T-Pain made headlines a few years ago for selling off the majority of his 32-car collection after previously getting rid of his prized Bugatti Veyron that required a ridiculously expensive repair. Last week he went on the popular web series Hot Ones, which has celebrities eating chicken wings dipped in progressively more intense hot sauces while answering questions, and talked at length about why he has become disillusioned with expensive luxury cars and supercars.

Hot Ones host Sean Evans mentioned that lots of musicians boast about cars like the Rolls-Royce Phantom all the time. But he’s never seen anyone “ride as hard for budget compacts” like the Scion xB and Mini Cooper like T-Pain does, and asks why cars like that are so special to him. “It’s just too much, sometimes it’s too much,” the rapper responds.

“I can floor my Mini Cooper for 20 minutes on the highway, just pedal to the metal going super fast, over 100 mph. Totally fine,” he says. “If you floor a Bugatti for 30 seconds, now you gotta replace radiators. Each radiator is 25 grand and there’s four of them in the car, but if you break one you gotta replace all of them. What is that?”

He’d know from experience, as I mentioned before. In a 2014 interview he talked about how he was “haulin’ ass in [the Veyron], like, a lot” and put a hole in one of the radiators. That worked out to a $90,000 repair, requiring all four radiators and the rear spoiler to be serviced. Instead of getting it fixed he sold the Veyron, which he had bought for $1.2 million, for a cool million dollars.

“Owning expensive cars is the worst,” T-Pain tells Evans. “I hate it and I don’t know why we moved into that and I don’t know why rappers before me made me think it was gonna be easy-peasy. Especially if you’ve got 19 of them, that was not fun.” It’s interesting to hear him talk about this, as flaunting expensive cars has become a major part of celebrity culture, let alone rap culture, and I can’t remember the last time I heard a celebrity talk about how owning a supercar can actually be terrible.

He also told an anecdote about how he had owned a Bentley Continental GT for just one day, left it parked at his studio while he went out of town, and then the studio flooded. “My car was underwater. If that would have happened with a Mini Cooper, I would have had another Mini Cooper the next day. But being that it was a Bentley GTC, there was no fixing it.” The car was a total loss, too water-damaged to be fixed, and he wasn’t able to recoup a single dollar. “Just stupid,” he said.

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And I’ve gotta say, I understand where T-Pain is coming from. I just spent a week in a new Mazda Miata, and there’s really something to be said for a small, cheap car that’s fun and nimble — and reliable. You can drive the absolute pants off a Miata or a Mini without breaking the law or breaking the car itself, and it will always be fun. Sure, supercars are incredible machines, but when are you really able to experience the full breadth of their capabilities?

In the episode T-Pain also talked about his newfound love for Animal Crossing during the COVID-19 pandemic, winning the first season of The Masked Singer and why he opened up his library of beats to Twitch streamers. The whole episode is well worth watching — he’s a seriously charming and funny guy with lots of interesting stories to tell.

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