THE Frankfurt Motor Show on September 12-22 will provide the stage for the world premiere of the third-generation BMW X6, which the carmaker said debuted the Sports Activity Coupe line for BMW 10 years back. To make the new model’s arrival more dramatic, a one-off X6 garbed in a Vantablack VBx2 nanostructure paintjob will be presented.
This show car is the result of a collaboration between BMW and Surrey NanoSystems, the inventors of the Vantablack technology. According to BMW, it is the first and only vehicle in the world to feature a Vantablack VBx2 paint finish.
“We turned down numerous requests from various automobile manufacturers in the past,” said Ben Jensen, founder and chief technical officer of Surrey NanoSystems. “It took the BMW X6 and its unique, expressive design for us to entertain the idea.”
The third-gen BMX X6 after getting the Vantablack paintjob…
…and before.
The design highlights of the X6, like the optional Iconic Glow kidney grille, twin headlights and taillights contrast the Vantablack VBx2 paint finish, which changes the viewer’s visual perception of an object’s three-dimensional shape, BMW said, adding “the human eye perceives Vantablack as two-dimensional.”
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, the carmaker explained.
It noted the 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 1% total hemispherical reflectance, or 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.
Vantablack, billed as the “blackest black,” was developed for aerospace applications, BMW said.
The carmaker bared it would start selling the third-generation X6 in November. Like its predecessors, the new X6 is produced at BMW’s plant in Spartanburg, US.
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