BMW X6 Gets Painted In Vantablack, The World’s Blackest Black

BMW has unveiled a new X6 painted in Vantablack that it will show to the world at the upcoming Frankfurt Auto Show.

Vantablack is known as the world’s blackest black and videos online of objects painted in Vantablack truly boggle the mind. Vantablack was first introduced by a company called Surrey NanoSystems in 2014. It absorbs 99.965 per cent of light making the human eye view a 3D object as it was 2D.

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The surface is made up of tiny carbon nanotubes that are around 5000 times thinner than a human hair, meaning approximately one billion of these tiny nanotubes fit into one square centimeter. This means that virtually all light hitting the surface is absorbed rather than reflected. As far as we’re aware, this is the first time a car has been painted Vantablack.

The Vantablack adorning the BMW X6 is the company’s VBX2 variant that was initially developed for use in architectural and scientific applications. Unlike the original Vantablack finish that absorbs almost all light, VBX2 allows for one per cent of light to be reflected so those viewing the car can still get a sense of the car’s shape. The coating can be sprayed on as if it was regular paint.

“To be honest, we received inquiries from most of the big-name automotive manufacturers, almost from the day we launched the original material in 2014, but we’d always said no,” Vantablack inventor and founder of Surrey NanoSystems said. “This was also due to the fact that we only had a suitable material once we came up with VBx2. When we were approached by BMW, we were still quite hesitant to begin with. But the new X6 looked so incredibly different that it just felt like a really good fit.”