BMW X6 Concept in Vantablack is The World's Darkest Car

We are talking about a one-off 2020 BMW X6 painted in “the world's blackest black,” which is possible thanks to the first application of Vantablack technology on a vehicle.

Keep in mind that the photos in the gallery have not been retouched in any way, and you will get the necessary proof in the making-of video down below. The show car is a collaboration between BMW and Surrey NanoSystems, the company supplying Vantablack technology.

Called VBx2, the extremely dark coating is a new version of the original Vantablack technology that was first developed in 2014, and it was specifically made for use in architectural and scientific applications.

Slightly “glossier” than the original, it can be sprayed on and has a one-per-cent total hemispherical reflectance (THR), meaning it's still part of the “super black” category but enables a small amount of reflection from certain angles.

That said, to the naked eye, any object painted with VBx2 pretty much losses its three-dimensional appearance in any kind of light. This is probably why the BMW X6 show car still keeps its trademarked illuminated kidney grilles, which now look like they're floating in a sea of total blackness.

“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. 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.” - Ben Jensen, Vantablack inventor and founder of Surrey NanoSystems.

The name “Vantablack” contains an acronym of the technology that enables this “super black” in its first two syllables, which stand for “Vertically Aligned Nano Tube Array, a carbon matrix. Each of those nanotubes is about 5,000 times thinner than a human hair, meaning that about a billion of them can fit into one square centimeter if they are vertically aligned. When light strikes such a surface it is almost completely absorbed instead of being reflected, hence the two-dimensional appearance of the BMW X6 concept from certain angles.