BMW was among the first manufacturers to latch onto the “crossover coupe” trend when it introduced the X6 in 2007. Essentially just a fastback-ified version of its X5 SUV, it retained the taller ride height and overall proportions, with an air of awkward sportiness about it.
Despite the segment’s growing popularity in the 18 years since, I never really fell in love with the X6. It always felt like a compromise to me, a slightly less useful version of the X5 that couldn’t make up for its shortcomings with looks alone.
The only truly interesting X6 built by BMW was the single show car it covered in a material called Vantablack. First shown in 2019, it made the rounds for a couple of years online before eventually disappearing. Its fate is much sadder than I could’ve imagined.
The Origins Of The Vantablack X6
The Vantablack X6 was conceived as a way to generate excitement for the then-new third-generation X6, which debuted alongside the Vantablack version at the Frankfurt Motor Show in the summer of 2019. According to BMW, it chose Vantablack to highlight the car’s shapely design. From the original release:
At the event, BMW will present a spectacular one-off vehicle with a Vantablack® VBx2 nanostructure paint finish that highlights the expressive design language and confident, dominant and muscular appearance of the new BMW X6 to perfection. This exclusive show car is the result of a collaboration between BMW and Surrey NanoSystems, the inventors of the Vantablack technology.
What makes Vantablack so interesting is its ability to absorb light. It’s considered one of the blackest materials on the planet, able to absorb 99.965% of light, according to BMW. It’s important to note that Vantablack is not paint, but rather a series of incredibly tiny tubes made from carbon and arranged closely together. VANTA is an acronym that stands for Vertically Aligned Nano Tube Array. It was originally developed for the aerospace sector:
Each of these carbon nanotubes has a length of 14 to 50 micrometers, 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 centimeter. Any light striking this surface is almost completely absorbed rather than reflected, and effectively converted into heat.
This technology was initially developed for coating space-borne components. As Vantablack can be applied at temperatures from as low as 430 degrees Celsius, it is suitable for delicate materials such as aluminium, and optical components coated in Vantablack enable observation of faint stars and distant galaxies that stray light from the sun makes difficult to detect.
The X6 was the first and only car to be painted in a true Vantablack material. According to NanoSystems, the car’s shape was enough to convince them to say yes after saying no to other manufacturers:
The BMW X6 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,” explains 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.”
Where Is the Vantablack X6 Now?
Vantablack, as it turns out, is a pretty delicate material. It’s not paint, where you can just throw a clearcoat over it and forget about it. Back in 2024, BMW Blog spoke on the reasons why the company didn’t show the X6 to the public’s eyes very often:
The innovation came with significant limitations. The Vantablack paint was highly sensitive to environmental factors, particularly light and dust, which could degrade its intense black finish. This presented a unique challenge for BMW, and there were very few instances where the car was shown to the public.
Those factors, ultimately, saw the car’s unique attribute slowly fade away.
The very qualities that made the car extraordinary also made it unsuitable for long-term display. Over time, exposure to light and environmental conditions would diminish the paint’s effectiveness, leading to a gradual loss of the car’s defining characteristic. It was also sensitive to touch. I recall filming the car and not being allowed to touch the velvet-like fabric because it would damage the expensive material. Faced with this reality, BMW made the decision to retire the Vantablack BMW X6.
BMW Blog goes on to claim, citing unnamed sources, that BMW “chose to destroy the vehicle” rather than keep it, saying the decision was “guided by a desire to preserve the integrity of the concept rather than dilute it by displaying a compromised version of the car.”
BMW itself has never confirmed the death of the Vantablack X6 … until today, that is. I reached out to a representative to see what happened to the car, and they simply told me that “the car is no more” and that it “met the grim reaper and lost.” If I had to guess, that means the car was probably crushed.
That’s a decidedly sad end to what was, to me, the most interesting X6 ever made. Hey, at least it existed at one point, right? So long as we have the memories, that’s all that matters.
Top graphic image: BMW
Vantablack is the, “But, ackshually…” of paint colors.
I really thought this was going to be an article on how BMW cancelled the X6. There’s no way they would ever cancel this cash cow.
I’ve never been a fan of those crossover coupes for the usual reasons. Heck, even the regular SUV version of most crossover SUVs have the back glass canted inwards at the top for a sleek look, which itself robs interior space. In some crossovers, this is annoyingly extreme to begin with, so to take it up another three notches by making the whole roof into a fastback just strikes me as silly… behind the second row of seats, there’s relatively little cargo room, despite the fact that you’re driving around in a big, hulking, lifted machine.
Also, BMWs marketing speak about the attributes of the X6 coupe benefiting from the Vantablack coating come off as silly. As can be seen from the photos, the Vantablack X6 highlights only the overall shape/sillouhette of the car, and not the “the expressive design language and confident, dominant and muscular appearance of the new BMW X6″ since most of the details can’t be clearly seen.
I wonder how the coating manages to get all the little tubes aligned up next to each other, but also uniformly perpendicular to the surface they’re applied to. I suppose electricity is involved, so that the base of the tubes orients towards the metal in the body, but how exactly? And if it is done like this, what about all the plastic in the bumpers and whatnot?
Though not nanotubes, there’ve been many ‘ultra-black’ paint coatings put on cars since 2019… a cursory search of Youtube will turn up more than a few. I never think it looks that good, since it tends to hide the surfacing details, but that’s just my opinion.