At this month’s Frankfurt Motor Show, BMW will unveil the next generation X6 featuring a new colour – Vantablack that absorbs rather than reflects light.
“The world’s blackest black” polarizes and creates a special visual effect for the BMW latest generation X6 debuting this month at the Frankfurt Motor Show
At the event, BMW will present a one-off vehicle with a Vantablack VBx2 nanostructure paint finish that highlights the expressive design language and confident, dominant and muscular appearance of the new BMW X6 to perfection.
This exclusive show car is the result of a collaboration between BMW and Surrey NanoSystems, the inventors of the Vantablack technology.
The BMW X6 is the first and only vehicle in the world to feature a Vantablack VBx2 paint finish.
A surface coated in Vantablack loses its defining features to the human eye, with objects appearing two-dimensional.
This can be interpreted by the brain as staring into a hole or even a void, making Vantablack a rather unsuitable vehicle paint finish, as it blots out virtually all the design details and highlights.
For this reason, the BMW X6 was coated in the VBx2 variant initially developed for use in architectural and scientific applications.
This coating can be sprayed on and has a one-per-cent total hemispherical reflectance (THR), meaning it is still considered “super black” while enabling a small amount of reflection from every angle. Thus, materials painted with it seem to lose their three-dimensional appearance – as demonstrated impressively on the BMW X6.
The name Vantablack has already become synonymous with an entire range of extremely black coatings and paints such as VBx2.
It contains an acronym of the technology enabling this superior black in its first two syllables, which stand for Vertically Aligned Nano Tube Array, a matrix made out of carbon. Any light striking this surface is almost completely absorbed rather than reflected, and effectively converted into heat.
This technology was initially developed for coating space-borne components.
The first generation of Vantablack introduced by Surrey NanoSystems in 2014 absorbed up to 99.965 per cent of light, almost completely eliminating reflectance and stray light.
Keyword: BMW X6 wears Vantablack paint in Frankfurt