BMW unveils car sprayed with Vantablack | Hacker News Reader

BMW unveils car sprayed with Vantablack

dezeen.com

224 pointstelotortium182 comments

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.

https://www.surreynanosystems.com/super-black-coatings/vbx-c...

And I think cancerous if inhaled.

Isn't this true of regular paint? So long as the paint is dry I'd hope (but I guess I don't know) it would be fine.

Everything is cancerous if inhaled. Even inert substances like talcum powder, dust from cutting stone or wood etc.

Everything solid

Not just solid, Oxygen is carcinogenic.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/6646012

Carbon nanotubes are capable of causing asbestos-related diseases like mesothelioma, which is very rarely caused by anything except asbestos exposure.

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.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2866017/

Only hard wood (like oak) IIRC, but yeah lungs are pretty fragile.

Less so, this is VBx2 not vantablack. They made a supposedly less cancerous version for this type of application.

Yes, I’d like the less cancerous car today, please. Thank you!

This thing will melt on a sunny day.

In other words, “black cars get dirty real fast”.

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.

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.

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.

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.

driving is not an issue. Parking on the street would definitely be

Was actually looking forward to a new world record of heat in a parked car.

That's ok, just fit a bigger engine and AC.

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.

A greater safety issue might be during the day, when people expect to actually see things (not just barely visible lights).

During the day the absence of light coming from a surface would be very conspicuous, even in shade.

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.

How much would the effect be lost if you put a high gloss coating over it?
You would obviously see all the specular reflections, but would the shadows look any different than a normal black at that point?
I’m guessing it would be kind of like LCD vs OLED—deeper blacks you mostly notice only in very dark scenes?

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.
https://www.dezeen.com/2019/02/05/black-3-0-stuart-semple-an...
That was an odd read. I didn't know exclusively licensing a colour was even possible.

Not the color itself (for example the RGB combination), but the pigment used to paint an object with that color.

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.

> I didn't know exclusively licensing a colour was even possible.
Yahoo! did the same with a specific Pantone shade of purple.

And T-Mobile trademarked their particular shade of magenta, right?

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.

For a fun example of how trademarks are limited, check out the “Microsoft Windows 95” beer. Sapporo owns the trademark for use on beer products.
https://www.ratebeer.com/forums/saporro-black-windows-95-edi...

That seems to have been an official promotional tie-in for the launch of Windows 95. I doubt they could have used "Microsoft" otherwise. https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/forums/t/611227/windows-95-...

Or the graphics, which are copyrighted.

This is a color _trademark_.

Nope, they specifically got an exclusive license from Pantone for the color in question.

The dude is mentioned every single time Vantablack comes up. People reward his actions with free marketing and lots of notoriety.

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."
*sic.

I thought the ways was: “There’s no such thing as bad publicity.” Which has the opposite meaning to the good publicity saying you’ve quoted.

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

Ahh yes, you’re right. I completely misread the GP. Thank you

There is an implied, “when it comes to revenue,” before that maxim.
Sometimes people care about other things than revenue.

That wasn’t what I was querying. My confusion was because I misread the GPs post and thought he was literally quoting the saying when he said:
> not all publicity is good publicity.
...rather than that being part of his own commentary on the saying.
It was really just a parsing error on my part rather then a disagreement with the point he is making.

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.

It's a cool stunt. I would love to see more objects painted with Vantablack, purely for fun.
Driving a car painted in Vantablack at night sounds pretty dangerous.
> When light strikes the surface, it is almost completely absorbed rather than reflected
Sounds hot like it would end up getting quite hot.

unless you plan to use your car a solar concentrator

London already has a tower for that: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-london-23930675

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.

Now that there's an implementation in the wild, add it. :)

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").

Probably something to do with this https://www.dezeen.com/2016/03/02/anish-kapoor-exclusive-rig...

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.

Good for avoiding LIDAR speeding tickets. Bad for avoiding self-driving cars.

I'm sure the Tesla in space has Black-Hole-Avoidance™️ technology at least.

Only if you are rolling around without a highly reflective license plate.

A lot of places don't require a front-plate, which should help with that problem.
Where I am, the reflective coating peels off within a few years...
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/newfoundland-labrador/peeling...
Dunno why the government only gives/negotiated a 5 year warranty on something that people keep much longer than that.

> Good for avoiding LIDAR speeding tickets.
no subject knowledge, but
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LIDAR_traffic_enforcement
lists US detectors as operating outside of the visible spectrum - does this actually block those frequencies?

Lidar on self driving cars have a hard time seeing black cars. Vanta Black is probably even harder to see.
Cops tend to shoot at the front license plate or the head lights so i doubt it would actually help.

>Cops tend to shoot at the front license plate or the head lights
That sounds pretty ambitious. It's difficult enough to hold a laser pointer on a stationary license plate size target 20m away.

The beam spreads a bit and they don't need it all to be reflected back, nor for very long.

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.

I'd argue it would probably be a better value to use a $2k lidar jammer than to use a paint job that highlights every spec of dirt on your car!

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.

Cars driven at night should have lights. It's very dangerous to drive a car of any colour at night without lights.

Even if there are lights it still makes it harder to see, which is more dangerous.

Slippery slope there. Is all black paint dangerous? Grey?

Black paint that has almost no reflectivity at all certainly is.
My family talks about black cows that your headlamps just don't see and how dangerous they are, this would be even more intense.

Most BMWs don't sit idle taking up two lanes of traffic, they only do that for parking spaces.

All matte paint on cars is dangerous, which I suspect is part of why you almost never see it except as a dodgy repair.

Matte vinyl wraps are common on high end cars in NYC. I see one a week, easy.

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.

"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.

should. ought. ....

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.)

Most do. Every car and motorcycle I own has reflectors on all sides.

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.

> 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..

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
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corner_reflector

It's exclusively a show car. You can take it easy.

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.

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.

Yes, moving to where cycling is more common definitely would help in this theory.
After writing my post I've found there's a lot of research in this area: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inattentional_blindness

If a driver is installing covers over their lights I don't think the color of the paint is the most irresponsible part

Unhooking the cable seems easier than installing covers. On most cars, you can get to it by peeling back the lining on the sides of the trunk.

This will make the marketing CGI much cheaper to render. Zero reflection means no bounces needed for the bulk of the car.

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.

I see Mr. Desiato is back from his year dead for tax reasons.

When can I get it in the pinkest pink? https://www.culturehustleusa.com/products/pink-50g-powdered-...

> 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.
https://static.dezeen.com/uploads/2016/12/anish-kapoor-stuar...

Maybe this condition is included in every EULA and this is just the first time we've noticed it.

Shadowbanned from life.

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%.

Sorry, typo. I meant to say vantablack will heat up slightly faster, not the other way around.

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.
I'd imagine that's be a rather high temperature.

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).

It can’t be driven on the road. The paint isn’t durable enough. This is just a cool stunt.

Non-durable paint prevents a car from being driven?

Well it can be but from what I understand the finish would wear off almost immediately and the cool black effect would vanish.

I agree. It'd probably be akin to gluing talcum powder on the car.

Look what happened to all the matte black factory paint jobs that were popular a few years ago.

Mercedes Magno Alanite matte finishes and BMW Frozen matte finishes look great even though they are several years old. They are incredibly tough.

Many look quite good, the only difference being the clear coat texture typically. The pigmented coats are the same.

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.

It's a BMW X6 so I don't think aesthetics or practicality will be of any concern.

I don't share the resentment towards BMW X6. I actually think it's the best looking BMW SUV. To each their own I guess.

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.
That was a good burn though.

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.

You're talking about it.
Mission accomplished.

"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."

"It's so ... black!" said Ford Prefect, "you can hardly make out its shape ... light just seems to fall into it!"

or just play along with Red Dwarf https://youtu.be/SqI41N4WGPM
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."

"What is this? Some kind of intergalactic hyper-hearse?"

Looks like a repost of:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20820000

The images are interesting --- I assume they are photographs, but the blackness makes them look like CGI.

"Those pedestrians ain't gonna kill themselves" https://mobile.twitter.com/mattmanning/status/11670737616837...

I’m seeing more and more vehicles with this flat, black paint. They look like crap, as if someone took a spray can of primer over the entire vehicle.

For people that like to use a very black paint and aren't Anish Kapoor Stuart Semple's Black seems like an option to paint stuff. https://culturehustle.com/products/black-v1-0-beta-the-world...

Kind of looks cool, but the effect will be lost almost as soon as it hits the road. High-tech paint is no match for plain old dirt.

[deleted]

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.

E9x was pretty good too.
But they really missed electric train, and this the main problem for BMW nowadays.

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.

> opinion: a view, judgment, or appraisal formed in the mind about a particular matter

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.

[deleted]

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 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.

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.

“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.

Not great for lidar on autonomous cars. Wonder what it's radar properties are like too.

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.

Reminds me of Tumbler's stealth mode.
https://youtu.be/gYHKHDuXYWw?t=30

I wonder how they will manage the heat when parked in the sun. Being an ideal absorber does not seem like a good quality for a car to have.

I doubt it'd be too much worse than a regular black car parked in the sun.

I'm pretty sure regular black paint has aluminum to reflect a lot of energy back out.

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.

I thought I had read something about it reflecting outside of the visible range. Could be mistaken.

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.

It will radiate it away as IR light.

Self driving car's LIDAR will love this

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?

Use backup sensors?

Really wish they had blacked the chrome grill too.
But practically it's a non-starter. You want your car to be visible in dusk conditions

I wonder if there's any potential for liability because it may be harder to see the car under some conditions.

Must be a hell to drive in the Cyprus sun!

vantablack has an interesting history - especially the feud between Anish Kapoor and Sturat semple.

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.

>The easiest car color to keep clean is white.
Have you ever owned a white shirt in your life?
Also, every white car here looks like this during the winter: https://www.germanboost.com/attachment.php?attachmentid=6058...

Cars of any other color look even worse.

>The easiest car color to keep clean is white.
I disagree with that. I think dirt is least visible on metallic grey.

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!

Actually, try something like Champagne or taupe -- basically the color of sand or dirt.

How wear resistant is it? Presumably any coating would add reflectivity?

Pretty much fuck all.

Very cool, but it would be coated in road salt for half the year here.

Life once again imitates Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy.

Mary Kay should make a "pinkest pink" Cadillac.

Would this be applicable for better stealth tech?

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?)

Probably better off painting it with zebra stripes like they did in WWI to throw off torpedo targeting.

It would almost certainly make it more difficult to detect with LIDAR systems.

How hot does that thing get out in the sun?

"Any customer can have a car painted any color that he wants so long as it is Vantablack." --Henry Ford or something

Looks pretty slick but I wonder about the visibility from other drivers points of view in certain conditions.

almost, but not quite, entirely black
hotblack desiato would be proud

Car crashes are a major cause of death. Actively making cars harder to see should be a crime instead of a stupid marketing gimmick.

The hardest color to see is probably silver, second-hardest grey. These seem to be a lot more popular than super-black.

What exactly is newsworthy here?
Some guys painted a car with a low-reflective black paint?
It's not like it's going into production or has any innovation behind it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com