Note to the comments: this is a one-off show piece, not something that anyone intends to use on the road. The VBx 2 coating is not fully waterproof, has extremely poor abrasion resistance and rapidly loses its light-absorbing properties if exposed to contamination.
Not to mention the complete safety hazard it would be. Removing cues as to its orientation and making it even harder to see at night would be dumb for a car intended to driven.
I saw this argument elsewhere and found it bizarre. Cars are covered with reflectors and lights for precisely this purpose. We’ve had black cars and matte colors (or just dirt) for decades. There’s also chrome bits, windows, mirrors etc. I suppose thing could be pretty dangerous driving around at night with no lights on, but so is a normal car and there are still the reflectors for just this purpose.
Unless it's pitch black out and you can only see the lights, things like reflections and contours of the car give you additional clues about its orientation and speed apart from its lights. We're used to using many different subconscious visual cues to place an object in space.
Maybe I'm overshooting on how much of a hazard it would be, but I have a hard to seeing how making a car any amount harder to see is a good thing.
It is a bit more complicated. This isnt just black paint. It dries into tiny 3d structures. These are very delicate little hairs, easily brushed off by any slight abrasion. Dirt is a problem, but airflow at speed (dust in that air) would be enough to remove this coating within hours.
Slight nitpick, but they are not using the original vantablack with a thread like structure in here. The article states it is a new compound with a sponge like structure.
But there's no reason you couldn't use it as an ultrablack pigment layer and simply tolerate the presence of some highlights. Wouldn't even have to be 'matte' surface, you could put a high gloss surface on there and still have it be different. Because it isn't just black paint, because it's a sponge-like structure inside a medium, that means you can use it as a simple pigment in a normal paint job, and it would be blacker than normal pigments in that context.
Might be possible to make an 'ultra gloss black' in that way. Highlights would reflect, but anywhere that isn't a highlight would be the depths of space. The glossier, the more extreme the effect.
Yes. Same problem as Ever-Dry, the extreme water repelling coating, which is also a surface of lots of tiny hair-like tubes. Great concept, but the effect that makes it work also makes it fragile. You can't coat either with something smooth and hard, or you lose the effect.
Talc is probably one of the more dangerous substances to inhale. Not only is it often contaminated with Asbestos, it might have some asbestos like properties of its own.
It’s not just inhaling - perineal exposure seems to be bad too and had been associated with increased endometrial cancer risk in some groups. Perineal BMW exposure seems less likely.
I really wish it were to be used on the road, even if there were rules regarding driving at night. It should be possible to give up a reasonable amount of absorption for the addition of a protective coating.
even if there were rules regarding driving at night
This car still has lights; and in the dark, even cars with normal paint tend to be invisible except for their lights. In other words, I don't think the paint will change its visibility in the dark if it has lights on.
I think the most interesting thing I learned out of that was from the link posted at the end about the feud between Kapoor and Semple about Kapoor's exclusive rights to vanta black in artwork and semple's creation of a competing almost absolute black colour usable by anyone but Kapoor.
>British artist Anish Kapoor acquired exclusive rights for the Vantablack pigment in 2016, making him the only person in the world who can paint using this colour.
>It led to a long-running feud with Stuart Semple who created his own version of blackest-black, available to anyone but Kapoor.
And then he went on to make the pinkest pink, the bluest blue, etc. None of which can be used by Kapoor.
Also note that vantablack is not "a color", it is a manufactured material, and that is entirely ownable (although Pantone will tell you that colours can, indeed, be copyrighted. At least by name, which is why they have identifiers for basically every colour that can be made at the moment...)
Pantone copyright issues aside, I do understand in this case it's more likely the patent to the actual nano-material itself and the writeup didn't necessarily make that clear, it's just a really strange case of exclusive patent licensing to me. I'd read before about vantablack, but it was only about how it worked, I wasn't aware of the exclusive licensing part of it.
Despite the saying, not all publicity is good publicity. Lots of people who'd never heard of Anish Kapoor now know him solely as "that douchebag who copyrighted* a color."
they were quoting the same quote you were but reframing it to make a point. there's no such thing as bad publicity more or less semantically conveys the idea that all publicity is good publicity, more often than not (though it could also imply that it could be neutral.)
either way, it is a bit confusing of a way to render it
One of my favorite stories in recent history, just because of how odd and entertaining the whole thing is. I know literally nothing about Stuart beyond this feud, but I smile every time I think of him and this story.
I don't even paint, and I almost bought some Stuart's blackest-black just because of how much I liked what he was doing, and how fun the whole feud felt. The paint isn't that expensive, I just don't know what I would do with it.
Colour trademarks are common, but they only apply in narrow areas. E.g. Cadbury chocolate has a trademark purple, but all that means is someone like Nestlé can't package their chocolate in a similar purple colour. Cadbury's purple can be freely used for any unrelated purpose though.
The timing of this marketing stunt was funny to me. I work on the development of Need for Speed Heat and a few days ago we had a discussion about which types of materials we can technically support in our player facing visual customization. We discussed materials that exist but we currently can't represent as well as materials we could make but which don't look real. I joked about adding Vantablack to the game, seeing as it would probably be entirely impractical in reality and look very surreal in the game.
Later that day, this was first published. What struck me was that the end result didn't look as bizarre as I had expected.
Note: it's coated in VBx2 which absorbs 99% of light, not in Vantablack that absorbs 99.96%. Apparently it's also not nanotubes (which is the "nt" in "Vanta").
Naw, it's that the traditional VB has to be "grown" and can't be spray applied, which is what this version is for. Growing the nanotubes makes them perfectly perpendicular. Spraying them... does not, but still achieves much of the same effect.
If it were me designing a laser speed camera, I'd have it be a pulsed 1500 nm laser with a beam spread big enough to cover a car at 200 yards. You don't need to hit just the license plate to get a good return from it.
That seems really irresponsible, the car would be very hard to see if you approach it from the rear at night, especially if the driver installs covers over the brake lights to make them darker. A few years ago where I live in the USA there was a news story being run about a controversial decision to not charge a driver who hit and killed somebody at night because the person they hit was black, wearing all black clothes, and walking in the street. I don't imagine a car painted with a material known to make the car close to invisible against a dark back drop would do any better in court if it was rear-ended.
"Should" is a word that ought to be banned from this sort of discussion.
It's illegal in this country—the UK—to drive at night without lights. Doesn't stop it happening, though. Either someone forgets to turn the lights on, if they're manually controlled, or they actively turn them off because the UI is ambiguous (this happened to me, once), or the filament bulb burns out (again: filament bulbs are/were mandatory in the UK, originally to rule out carbide lamps without actually banning them), or there's a wiring/software fault.
The point is, vehicle safety measures should be fail-safe, and driving an invisible vehicle at night and relying on lights to make yourself seen is kind of the opposite of that.
Following that, it's hard to argue that cars shouldn't come with mandatory reflective strips. (Which, of the top of my head, actually doesn't seem like a bad idea.)
Do they? Every so often I come up on a vehicle at night with no lights on, and I've never noticed any notable reflectors, like say, runners wear at night for visibility.
That’s true. But I’ve found on a couple occasions that I couldn’t see a car in my mirror when driving at night because it was very dark colored and its headlights were hidden by my b-pillar.
This sort of thing wouldn’t happen much when headlights sprayed widely, but newer focused headlights are harder to see from the side.
As a cyclist who wears hi-viz clothing every time I ride (even in broad daylight), I'm somewhat amazed by how many drivers still don't see me. When I have the opportunity I'll ask a driver who clearly missed me what I could have done to make myself more visible, and I am yet to get any actual advice on that. I'm probably about as visible as I can be.
I also have front and back lights (which I only use when dark as I'm not convinced that they help during the day), hi-viz tape covering parts of my bike, and a large hi-viz sign mounted to the back of my bike as a reflector.
A lot of this I think has to do with distracted driving. I've also read that there's a psychological phenomena where someone might be looking directly at something but still not see it because they didn't expect it. So drivers expect cars on the road, not bikes, so making myself brighter might not help. I would need to make myself look more like a car in this theory. I recall reading someone suggest that looking like a person could help, or having motion (i.e., reflectors on your pedals).
Of course, I don't believe that some sort of perceptual blindness is any excuse. Many people would talk about banning self-driving cars that completely missed certain road users, but I'm not sure most drivers would be as enthusiastic about banning drivers who fail the same test.
Perceptual blindness is a thing even if it isn’t an excuse. Biking somewhere where biking is common and motorists are used to bikes (eg in the Netherlands or even China) is actually very effective, if unachievable.
While Vanta black is much darker than regular black paint when observed well lit areas, i’m not sure that the difference would matter much in the dark, given that regular black vehicles are already effectively invisible but for their lights.
Black paint with a poly-coat at night is highly reflective. Vantablack is going to stay black when you shine a light on it from any direction and reflection angle.
It's hard to see most dark cars at night. You can see for yourself if you come across someone who forgets to turn on their lights. There are two things that help the most:
1) Their own lights
2) Your own lights bouncing off various corner reflectors [1] on the target car
In my country there have been quite a few accidents like that. People here like to wear dark colours, and in-general take a lot of risks on the road (cars, pedestrians and cyclists). There are jay-walking laws, but most people don't pay much attention, and pedestrians will walk into a cross walk without checking for cars, as cars should give way to pedestrians.
A law was passed last year requiring pedestrians walking at night to be more visible to cars by wearimg reflective material. I don't think anyone has been charged for not doing it, however when it came into force the police started giving away reflective armbands and then companies started doing the same for promotion. Basically anyone you see with a bag or rucksack has one of these attached.
> controversial decision to not charge a driver who hit and killed somebody at night because the person they hit was black, wearing all black clothes, and walking in the street.
I don't think there has been a history of racism against dark colored automobiles, so probably slightly less controversial..
Regular car paint is also notoriously hard to render correctly because of the light bouncing inside the coating, and the paint having varying thickness in different parts of the car. Rendering Vantablack on the other hand is trivial.
> By adding this product to your cart you confirm that you are not Anish Kapoor, you are in no way affiliated to Anish Kapoor, you are not purchasing this item on behalf of Anish Kapoor or an associate of Anish Kapoor. To the best of your knowledge, information and belief this paint will not make its way into that hands of Anish Kapoor.
I keep wondering, does vantablack have a maximum rate/cm^2 at which it releases heat; does light exposure beyond some intensity cause it to burst into flames?
All matter has a rate at which it emits radiation that depends on its temperature (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black-body_radiation). Ordinary black pigment which might absorb 95% of light will only heat up slightly faster than vantablack which absorbs 99.9%.
So at some constant rate proportional to the delta between the material and the environment?
Essentially I'm wondering at what point that isn't fast enough to avoid combustion.
Since it consists of densely packed nanotubes, I'm guessing that oxygen will be in short supply deep down where the light is converted, so it might need to be close to the point where the heat is high enough to disintegrate a nanotube.
This is a cool color. I bet just about everybody working on self-driving cars though is terrified of this, as it's almost invisible to lidar. It will also be very difficult to see with cameras at night (not to mention the human eye).
Cars are a really weird choice of consumer products to paint in vantablack. All the aesthetics of rigid car body shapes are obscured and you can't really appreciate it. Not to mention how impractical such a car would be.
I totally understand that this is an artistic concept and nobody is planning to mass-produce or sell those, but still.
What I really wanna see in vantablack is clothing. I think it'd look really interesting and eye-catching.
I remember, being 6.4”, having to have my head tilted in the back seat as the roof slopes severely to the trunk.
Just thought it was so silly, and felt that this, this has to be one of the most pointless vehicles made in the most recent times. It’s just a SUV for the people in front.
Such a weird life-style mobile, but as you say - to each their own.
Neither do I but I can see where that is coming from. X6 looks like a low SUV or a bulky car, rather non traditional design, a BMW version of Subaru Forrester.
"It's the wild colour scheme that freaks me out," said Zaphod, whose love affair with the ship had lasted almost three minutes into the flight. "Every time you try and operate these weird black controls that are labeled in black on a black background, a little black light lights up in black to let you know you've done it."
that out of the way, even the pictures of this BMW don't look real. It would be something I would want to see in full sun as well as in the shade. i can see all sorts of non automotive uses for it. probably would be played out too much
I'm glad to see this was posted. As I was reading the article I was thinking, "Ahh, this reminds me of a Douglas Adams quite. I will have to post it when I'm done. Hacker News will surely appreciate it."
For anyone unfamiliar, its from "The Restaurant at the End of the Universe" part of the "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" series which I would highly recommend.
It reminded me of the Spinal Tap bit about the black album. "There's something about this that's so black, it's like how much more black could this be? And the answer is none. None more black."
I think the X6 was an excellent choice for this demo. Anything to make that hideous plumped up "car" less noticeable is a good thing.
I'm with you on this. Say whatever you want about SUVs, crossovers, and the like. The X6 is just ugly as sin. It's as if the designers took a car body, slid the scale parameter in their CAD to 125%, and knocked off early for the day.
I really dislike this type of comment. I’m sure the people buying the X6 like it. You aren’t the only one buying BMWs, and it’s ok that not every model appeals to your needs. Buy whatever you like, but don’t assume that there’s anything shameful about a company making products that you wouldn’t buy.
The Golden Rule and the NAP stand for instructive, good principles, here. Treat others the way you want to be treated, and don't do things which harm others.
It could be argued the BMW X6 is gluttonous. It gets horrible fuel economy, and it's characteristics of size + performance lend credibility to the idea of it being a burden on the road for others.
Finally, I disagree with your general sentiment against criticism. Criticism makes us better.
If there's one thing people hate more than BMWs and SUVs in general, it's the X6. But people also hate hybrids (granted, usually not the same people). So guess what? BMW made a (somewhat obscure) hybrid X6 with 480 HP and 18 mpg. I've been tempted to find one just because it's the confluence of so many types of petty hatred.
One thing to think about is that the effect of a vehicle on the environment depends not just on the mpg, but on how far you drive it, and how many people you transport on average.
Heavier vehicles carry more kinetic energy and do more damage in a crash; taller vehicles are more likely to cause severe injuries to pedestrians.
Crossover SUVs are essentially antisocial - they confer no practical benefit to the driver over a sedan or a wagon, but create considerable additional externalities.
The X6 has super-heavy steering, terrible visibility in any direction other than forward, has crappy rear seat space and headroom and laughable cargo space, has left me stranded twice, is kind of weird looking and yet is an unabashedly aggressive joy to drive, especially the 5.0 or X6 M although the 3.0L is no slouch. I love the thing. It is a horrible idea raised to near-perfection.
The difference in height between a wagon and a crossover is about two inches, using the Subaru Outback/Forester as an example pair. And the ground clearance is quite likely the same, which means the difference in the height of the CG is probably in between.
To me, it seems reasonable to question whether an inch more or less does in fact make a "considerable" difference or whether this is another moral condemnation of something trivial.
It's gotten really irritating to me the way people, not just you, continually make remarks that assume quantitative evidence for something, and throw in the word "externalities" as though that proves a point.
Externalities are everywhere, but it's not reasonable to use them as an all purpose short circuit for everything. And they are finite. People treat "externalities" as arbitrarily large, as though that was inherent in what they are. That is, conversationally, the purpose the term now serves.
“We realised that it wouldn't have worked if we'd put on the original Vantablack material, as the viewer would have lost all sense of three-dimensionality”
Isn’t that the point?
It’s a bit like saying an Escher drawing “doesn’t work” because the viewer can’t tell where the stairs start or end.
How safe is it esp. in low light/nights? Unless other vehicles have Radar/LiDAR sensors, it’s not so easy to detect.camera sensors might face challenges to detect this car. Other vehicles might hit this vanta black parked car.
I'm pretty sure soon enough some people will buy things to just mess with self driving cars. Some just hate them, some do it for fun, some don't want the technology to be on the streets.
Actually, no. Our perception of light is logarithmic, so what we perceive as "middle gray" only reflects 18% of the light, with darker shades reflecting exponentially less. Our perception of sound is also logarithmic BTW, so a 100W speaker is nowhere near 10x as loud as a 10W one, nor 100x as loud as 1W.
All else being equal, and ignoring the question of perceived loudness, (massive hand-waving ahead), shouldn't a power of 10 increase in speaker wattage result in, at best, a sqrt(10) increase in loudness since that power is used to drive something with area to actually move the air?
No. Ten times the power gives you ten times the power/m^2 at the same distance.
The distance at which you can hear the sound (in first order approximation) _does_ scale by a factor of √N if you increase power by a factor N, but that’s not normally how one defines loudness.
Will not have any lidar returns, though if it’s not in front of a vantablack backdrop then it will cast a pretty sharp silhouette. What would a deep net do?
It'll be this black for like 15 minutes until it gets a little dirt on it. Then it will be permanently dirty looking. The easiest car color to keep clean is white. At least you don't see every tiny speck of dust on it until it gets really dirty. Source: had black and blue cars. Never again.
I am not sure what the colour has to do with keeping it clean, or are you talking about perceived dirtiness? I think you can see dirt or whatever more on white cars. As to keeping it clean: whatever method you do, works independently of the colour of your car. Is this incorrect? If so, let me know. I do not know much about cars, nor about cleaning them. I would assume that the cleaning method's effectiveness is not dependent on the colour. Is it? If it is effective, both your black and your white car would look clean (less dirty, etc.). If this is not the case, please let me know!
stealth is mostly about radar reflection rather than visible spectrum. Stealth tech already uses various RAM (radar-absorbent materials) that operate on similar principles and have varying degrees of durability. But if you want to mess with people's perception this is great (maybe an urban combat or navy seal type work?)
https://www.surreynanosystems.com/super-black-coatings/vbx-c...