"Vantablack" Ferrari SF90 Stradale Looks Like a Fast-Moving Black Hole

The way Vantablack works is actually quite simple yet brilliant. To get it, you have to think at a microscopic scale or even beyond that (nanoscopic?). Imagine the painted surface is covered in trillions of tiny black tubes, one end lying on the object itself, the other exposed and allowing light to enter.

As the light gets in, it's bounced between the walls of the cylinder so many times that it eventually dissipates into heat, failing to escape back into the world. As we know, we need light to bounce off objects and hit our eyes to see them, which is why something covered in Vantablack appears as an amorphous blob of darkness. According to its creators, it can absorb up to 99.965% of visible light, which is scaringly close to 100 percent.

Why would Ferrari cover one of its older models into this kind of material, you ask? Well, you only need to watch the video to come up with a pretty solid guess, and that's even if you don't read the text provided by the author. Think of this: what do you need to capture something on camera? That's right, light, and with the car covered in Vantablack (or any of its surrogates), the spy photographer would only get 0.035% of the amount normally coming off the vehicle hitting their sensor. Good luck making out the car's details.

At least, that's the theory because even though the images of the SF90 seem unreal, we can still spot a large part of its features. Maybe that's because we already know what the hypercar looks like, or because the lines of this particular model are so bold, they could pierce through any camouflage—who knows?

Considering what the car looks like in plain daylight, one thing is certain: they won't be able to drive these cars at night without applying some reflective stripes on their sides. Could this be the end of dazzling black-and-white pattern camouflage for Ferrari prototypes? If it is, we can't say we'll miss them.