Frankfurt Motor Show 2019: BMW X6 Vantablack showcased

- The X6 Vantablack is the world’s ‘blackest Black’

- The paintjob absorbs 99.96 per-cent of light

German marquee BMW has showcased the X6 Vantablack at the ongoing Frankfurt Motor Show. The X6 Vantablack features the world’s blackest black paintjob, a colour which was introduced in 2014 by a brand known as Surrey NanoSystems. 

The acronym behind the name stands for vertically Aligned Nano Tube Array (VANTA), a matrix made out of carbon. Each of these carbon nanotubes has a length of 14 to 50 micrometres, with a diameter of 20 nanometres, making it around 5,000 times thinner than a human hair. As a result, around a billion of these vertically aligned carbon nanotubes fit into one square centimetre. Any light striking this surface is almost completely absorbed rather than reflected.

Said to absorb 99.965 per-cent of light, the Vantablack colour eliminates reflections and makes the human eye believe a 3D object like it is a 2D object. The Vantablack colour was initially developed for aerospace applications to suppress stray light from the sun during observation of celestial bodies in faraway galaxies.

Ben Jensen, founder and Chief Technical Officer of Surrey NanoSystems, said, “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.”