Of Course We Need a Vantablack® Car

German automaker BMW painted one of their new X6s in Vantablack®.  You know… that paint artist Anish Kapoor controls the usage of. BOO. To be more clear, he had to give his blessing of the project.  Wrap your head around that, someone controls the usage of a color.   Anyhow, this paint absorbs 99.965 per cent of light hitting it.  Composed of nanotubes that just suck up light, this paint is much cooler than a matte black wrap.  It also probably makes the car undefinable on the road and therefore confusing and dangerous.  I’m sure it’ll never be part of a wide-spread release strategy, but it’s a very cool project nonetheless.

From the Press release:

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.