The All New 2020 BMW X6 in Vantablack
This is something you wouldn’t have seen before. It’s the 2020 BMW X6 covered in the darkest man made material ever made. Vantablack absorbs 99.96% of light! Making it the definition of darkness, the darkest man made material on earth.
It is essentially the closest you can get to a black hole with virtually no light being able to escape from it. Vantablack is made up of minuscule carbon nanotubes. When light hits the tubes. It is almost completely absorbed with the tubes being so thin that the photons, the particles that make light, can’t get in.
The material on this car isn’t quite the full 99.96% black. But is instead a spray-able material known as VB x 2 which has 99% light absorption.
That 1 percent definitely makes a difference in terms of picking out shapes on the car but, it is still frighteningly dark. The human eye struggles to pick out shapes covered in Vantablack, essentially rendering 3D structures into simple 2D shapes.
Any other black surface you can shine a spotlight at and be able to at least pick out some shapes and contours.
Now to get Vantablack onto a car you have to spray it, and the spray material is slightly different to the carbon chip material. If you were to zoom in on this Vantablack on this X6 you’d essentially see something resembling a coral reef. So the photons reach that coral reef and get trapped within it. Meaning the light gets absorbed and you get this effect.
So why is BMW covered this X6 in Vantablack? Well, one of the new features on the car is this illuminated kidney grille. If it isn’t massive already, why not illuminate it with light to really show it off and the contrast between that and the Vantablack is pretty striking.
Although from the perspective of many critics it is assumed that they’ve covered it in Vantablack because it’s not exactly known as the best looking car they produce. So cover in this material and it basically disappears.
Think back of the movie Batman Begins, when Batman switches off all the light on his Bat Mobile and he sneaks through the police traffic. This car can definitely do that!
