BMW Releases the First Invisible Car- BMW Vantablack VBxc2
BMW is a household name; it wouldn’t be wise of me to spend time explaining about this respected German brand. The giant car builders decided it was time it meets the Vantablack light-absorbing paint, the darkest shade of black ever created. Here is a sneak preview of the BMW Vantablack VBxc2; let’s ride into the future.
In September 2019, the Frankfurt Motor Show provided the backdrop for the world premiere of the third-generation BMW X6. The spectacular one-off vehicle is extremely black, that you might struggle to see it. It is painted with “the world’s blackest black” coating — Vantablack VBx2 — that absorbs more than 99 percent of visible light. The exclusive show car resulted from a collaboration between BMW and Surrey NanoSystems, the Vantablack technology inventors. The Vantablack VBx2 nanostructure paint finish highlights the expressive design language and confidence of this super machine and shows the dominant and muscular appearance of the new BMW X6 to perfection.
Somebody is probably wondering why the BMW X6 deserves so much respect. Well, if you never knew, this is the first and only vehicle in the world to feature a Vantablack VBx2 paint finish. No machine comes close to what this car can deliver, at least for now. With design highlights like the optional Iconic Glow kidney grille, distinctive twin headlights, and striking taillights, the new BMW X6 provides fascinating contrasts to offset the Vantablack VBx2 paint finish. This, in fact, what changes the viewer’s visual perception of an object’s three-dimensional shape. It’s essentially like looking into the darkness of the universe in its grand expanse of nothingness while contemplating the lifeless hole that has engulfed your soul as you age towards oblivion, but the present is a BMW badge, grille, and headlights. It is something you have to see for yourself because the car loses all dimensions and looks like a silhouette even when the lights are turned on.
Let’s face it, cruising around in a nearly invincible car would be awesome; I mean, who wouldn’t want to be the modern-day Batman? The spacy, three-dimensional, is impressive, and any automobile aficionados will be more than excited to see it. It is a shame it won’t be mass-produced.
A surface coated in Vantablack loses its defining features to the human eye, with objects appearing two-dimensional. The brain can interpret this as staring into a hole or even avoid, making Vantablack a rather unsuitable vehicle paint finish as it blots out virtually all the design details and highlights. Vantablack is not actually a color pigment or a paint, but a coating of carbon nanotubes. These have the property of absorbing incident light almost completely. Against a deep black background, objects coated in Vantablack material seem to disappear, as the perception of spatial depth is lost. 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.
The third generation BMW X6 has a sloping, coupe-like roofline to the back and available as the rear drive sDrive40i and all-wheel-drive xDrive40i. Both use a powerful turbocharged 3.0-liter inline-six making 665 horsepower and 330-pound feet of torque.
The name Vantablack has already become synonymous with an entire range of extremely black coatings and paints such as VBx2. It contains an acronym of the technology enabling this superior black in its first two syllables, which stand for Vertically Aligned Nano Tube Array, a matrix made out of carbon. Each of these carbon nanotubes has a length of 14 to 50 micrometers, with a diameter of 20 nanometers, 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 centimeter. Any light striking this surface is almost completely absorbed rather than reflected, and effectively converted into heat.
The BMW X6’s super black, non-reflective paint makes it unique: never before has a car been painted in Vantablack. This car is eye-catching in the truest sense of the word, thanks to its light-absorbing paint. As Vantablack can be applied at temperatures from as low as 430 degrees Celsius, it is suitable for delicate materials such as aluminum. Optical components coated in Vantablack enable observation of faint stars and distant galaxies that stray light from the sun makes difficult to detect. The first generation of Vantablack introduced by Surrey Nano Systems in 2014 absorbed up to 99.965 per cent of light, almost completely eliminating reflectance and stray light. Then came this collaboration with BMW. The design elements of the BMW X6, such as the illuminated kidney grille, the dual headlights and the strikingly designed tail lights, contrast with the smooth surface of the light-absorbing paint.
According to designer Hussein Al Attar, this was the special lure of the Vantablack car project. The non-reflective paint also opened up new perspectives for the designers, who were able to concentrate on silhouettes and proportions without having to consider reflections, shading and light. This show car was destined to remain a one-off because of the enormous difficulty involved in making Vantablack paint suitably durable for everyday automotive use. The car paint needed for the world’s blackest black is also extremely expensive, not to mention questionable in terms of road safety due to its level on the absorption spectrum. However, the technology was set to be used in laser-based sensor arrangements for driver assistance systems and thus in autonomous driving.
LiDAR- Light Detection and Ranging, has become one of the go-to-sensors for most automakers to help vehicles see the road, especially for driver’s assistance features. In addition to adding redundancy systems that already have cameras and radar, LiDAR’s ability to create high definition images from the bouncing of light off surfaces from far distances gives vehicles a more robust piece of data about an object.