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
FTFT
“It’s like, how much more black could this be? And the answer is none. None more black.”
You can paint that horrendous lump any color you want, it’s still an ugly ungainly POS.
You sure that isn’t the stunt ship for Disaster Area?
Just yesterday, I saw a Mini Cooper (in black) decked out with Hitchhiker’s Guide graphics and a vanity plate reading “Desiato.” Personally, I’d rather fire the X6 into the sun. And if I could fire every X6 into the sun, even better haha
I remember reading about this car when it debuted but never knew the underlying technology. So, thank you for writing this up.
My ex had a 2015 X5 sDrive35i when we met. It was not a great car. We traded it on an ’18 MDX when the self-leveling rear suspension started doing a Carolina squat overnight and often during lunch hour. It looked nice but didn’t drive particularly well. And I thought the X6 looked silly. There was or is a Mercedes GLC that I also dislike the looks of. The loss of cubic space in the rear is a compromise that makes no sense to me. Particularly as ugly as they are to my eyes.
Rather than spray it on, a femtosecond laser can create micro and nanoscopic structures on the surface to trap incoming light. You need to go femtosecond to avoid affecting the underlying metallurgical properties.
https://hef.group/en/ultra-fast-femtosecond-laser-treatment-a-high-performance-technological-opportunity/
And it will take approximately 5 quadrillion years to treat the entire surface as you raster a 20-micron beam.
Interestingly, a femtosecond is also the infinitesimal unit of time between my wife noticing I’m on my phone, and figuring out I’m scrolling FBM for weird cars.
Any light striking this surface is almost completely absorbed rather than reflected, and effectively converted into heat.
This should have been fun driving in the sun. Let alone coming back to the car after it was parked in the sun for half a day. Pizza oven!
Regarding the X6 ; I always thought the X5 looked better. Simple. I don’t like sloped rear quarters of a(ny) car.
However, I did drive with a guy in an X6M and he drove it hard on mountain roads and it was quick and it did handle properly and that engine made great sound. An E71 with the 4.4 twin turbo V8 S63. Good for around 550 hp. But yeah, not beautiful.
It sounds like a really shitty financial decision,but I think it’s good news.
I’m in favour of anything which means I see less X6, and now I can see even less of an X6 I already couldn’t see much of since it absorbed all the light. This is just fantastic news all round
I remember the mild controversy when they sold an artist, Anish Kapoor, exclusive rights to use Vantablack in art. So they seem to be a company with a history of poor taste, matches well with the ugly X6.
I wonder how well Stuart Semple’s World’s Pinkest Pink would hold up under automotive conditions when clearcoated?
Probably better than blackest black. Pinkest pink can be mixed with resin (in fact, they recommend it) whereas blackest black works in part precisely because it’s not a smooth surface. I’ve had good luck using it on camera internals.
The group that he partnered with to make Pinkest Pink also makes a Blackest Black (Black 4.0) that’s an actual paint and seems VERY black (and also has the “you can’t buy this if you’re Anish Kapoor” agreement which I love).
Came here to say this!
I have a bottle of Misou black, it is similarly fragile and degrades if handled at all.
This quote is obviously marketing BS, because not even someone who truly loves the X6 would say something as absurd as this and I assume BMW was the very first automaker to even ask, but the fact the guy was willing to say it on the record shows what poor taste these guys have.
I read that as “BMW was the first company to pay the exorbitant fee”
What I found funny about their statement was, once you painted the car that color, you literally couldn’t see any detail about the car-so how is anyone seeing “expressive design”, when the lights, windows and grille are all that is visible?
Now that you point it out, maybe what he meant was “The X6 was the only car hideous enough to necessitate the visual black hole treatment.”
What a relief that this monstrosity is gone forever. Kudos to BMW for actually choosing the X6 for the Vantablack treatment in the first place. It must have dawned on them (but too late) that the X6 is one of the worst BMW design ever.
I have a couple pieces of test equipment and some samples painted with this coating for work. It is only super non reflective from normal incidence — if you look off axis and / or under standard room lighting that comes from multiple angles then it just looks matte grey / black.
It probably looked deep black under some very specific lights in a controlled room and like a crappy matte grey color at all other times. This coating was always a waste of time on a vehicle.
Since it faded so quickly they should have offered it as a subscription service. Everybody loves subscriptions!
The renewal cost would be a lot more than $22 per cm sq; that cost is for a size and shape the lab is already set up for.
I ordered supposed vantablack paint and Black 4.0 paint, and no matter the number of coats, they do not appear like this in real life. Whatever they do to achieve this isn’t replicable with the consumer-available versions even on a small scale.
Vantablack isn’t paint, so whoever sold you that was a scammer.
Did anyone ever admit why the X6 was the car they tried the light absorbing finish disappearing act with? Even the god-awful big mouth bass look BEVs can’t knock this off the pedestal as ugliest BMW.
At least it’s not malaise era.
One time my wife parked pointing towards a Murano Cross Cab and I was making annoying noises about my retinas being etched and she said “Worse than that one BMW thing?” (Referencing the X6) but then the driver lowered the Murano’s stop and she re-parked.
I got more:
it retained the taller ride height and overall proportions, with an air of awkward supositortiness about it.
There were 5 letters missing, but I found them.
They weren’t missing, they were in vantablack and couldn’t be seen.
I was expecting some mention that the reason for doing the X6 was to see if vantablack could cover up the ugliness of its shape and proportions?
An exercise in pointlessness
And nothing of [aesthetic] value was lost.
Once more: this title format is a comma splice. I will continue pointing this out.
As I said yesterday, I love this site and deeply appreciate your hard work. This is the best corner of the internet. No disrespect is intended. It just pains me to see this very flagrant mistake made over and over and over in your headlines!
People are alergic to semicolons.
too much association with colostomies.
Or colonoscopies.
This led me to hours on “The Oatmeal”. I forgot why I was there and just enjoyed. Thank you.
Then I came back here and remembered.
Car related because “When should I use a semicolon” has a car related example.
https://theoatmeal.com/comics/semicolon
The grammar checker on this site is diametrically opposed to the use of commas around the words “but” and “and” as described in The Oatmeal graphic. I had forgotten about that site. So, thanks! xkcd.com is another great one.
Comma splices are pretty low on my few complaints about the site. I hate the way the comments sort. I must’ve made a redundant comment more than 20 times only to read that someone had already made the same point. That pains and embarrasses me.
What I really want, Matt, Jason, David and Brian, is for the comments when you get to the end of an article to sort oldest first. So, like on page 1 and not page 3. That way, as I read them, in chronological order, I will be able to see if someone has already made the point I was going to make. And not waste my time and other peoples’ time or precious bytes on your presumably cloud storage.
And as someone who spent a couple of years as a newspaper reporter, I tend to spot typos and missing characters that it seems like someone, or some algorithm should be catching.
And honestly, the older I get, the more prone I am to be making typos and skipping words that were in my head but didn’t quite make it to my fingers. So, I am trying to be less pedantic these days.
I See Your Point, There’s Nothing to Be Done for it Now
(twitch)
The correct answer is seldom used; the algorithm must hate semicolons.
Autopian doesn’t want you to pause when reading the title; hence, no comma.
Love The Oatmeal link 05LGT provided below….
I used to be incredibly pedantic about grammar, and as a community college graduate; I’m not even great at it myself. In my current working environment I am often the only native English speaker, and have come to appreciate the effort everyone extends to communicate in a non-native language for my benefit. Sometimes I’m the only one who doesn’t share their native language, and a dozen people with struggle though complicated concepts in English to make sure I can follow along. As such I no longer hold people to such stringent standards, and I also managed to stop caring if my name was mis-pronounced, after a lifetime of bristling at anyone who didn’t get it right the first time. I know they are speaking to me, they know, and often even try to correct, and then revert later. I’m sure I am doing their names a similar injustice, and appreciate their grace in not holding it against me.
I mean, I think it’s fair to say that this highlighted the X6s design language cause the best thing you can do to any crossover “coupe” is make it as hard to see as possible.
No sads from me. Also I’m team black 4.0 so, Nuts to that Anish Kapoor guy.
What absolute nonsense to claim that it “highlights the expressive design language” by making said design language almost completely invisible.With all the light-and-shade that car designers agnoise over completely taken away by light-absorbing nanotubes, all that’s left to look at are the bloated sloppy proportions and the tacky light-up grille. But then, hiding the X6’s design as much as possible was always the best thing to do to it.
In a way I will always resent the original X6 for popularising the dumbest bodystyle in all of production car design… and it’s never got any less hideous.
The X6 may have popularized the awful “sports activity coupe” look, but I believe the SsangYong Actyon was the first model in production.
The AMC Eagle had that awkward liftback-look on an SUV before either.
I chose to read that as a subtle jab that it was so fucking ugly, they finally agreed to try to see if they could fix it by rendering it invisible.
That literally made me laugh out loud. Like the Romulan “Cloak Mode” in Star Trek. And to fact-check myself, I searched and there are apparently, three different modes over all the generations. I only have so much space in my brain for sci-fi, so I just didn’t want to go down that rabbit hole.
Despite their mischaracterization of the effect of the Vantablack (“highlights the expressive design language”), BMW did in fact choose the perfect coating to apply. Obscure, obscure, obscure, please! The only thing worse are those two matching AMG blumps (blimp-lumps) that park down the block from me.
Can they make this standard across the entire current BMW lineup so that we don’t have to look at them? TIA.
I’m sure they’d still do the bright red pig nose like they did on the XM.
I still watch that promo video and think, “I’m glad the woman from Gerudo Valley was able to find new work after Nintendo released The Ocarina of Time.”
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.
They did cancel the X4. The X4 had a surprising amount of exports – a very high % were shipped internationally from Spartanburg. The X4 was also more of a big tall sedan than the x6 so it should have been appealing to our sedan lovers.
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.
The whole point of a slanted-inward rear window on a wagon is to deepen the opening and draw the upper edge inward away from where someone loading it might bump their head. The higher the overall height, the less necessary that is.
I dunno about that being the whole point. It seems to have more to do with aesthetics than anything else. But yes, pushing the hinge away from the person opening the hatch helps avoid head bonks, as does increasing the overall height. I wish they’d just use hinges that open to a greater angle, even if it means placing a second grab handle halfway down the interior of the hatch so it can be reached (when there’s no power liftgate).
A flat roof and nice vertical tailgate make for maximum cargo capacity, which I prefer. But my preferences don’t design vehicles of course.
It’s all about the aero first, then aesthetics, and finally usability.
Provided without snark, as it’s a fascinating material:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vantablack
It is fascinating.
I’ve used the actual material (the coating, not the paint) in my work (to control stray light), and it’s fascinating to look at. From some shallow angles and with a bright light, there’s a slight visible scatter from the surface, but mostly, it’s like looking at a deep dark hole.