Chinese Researchers Just Built Vantablack’s Cheaper Cousin—and It Actually Might Work on Cars

Remember 2019, when BMW rolled out an X6 so impossibly dark it looked like a glitch in reality? That was Vantablack—a material that swallows 99.965 percent of light and turns any three-dimensional object into a two-dimensional void. Enthusiasts spent years waiting for BMW to slap it on a production car. They’re still waiting.

Now, a team of Chinese researchers claims they‘ve cracked the code on a paint that’s nearly identical in performance but actually scalable for manufacturing. And they’ve got the durability data to prove it might not be complete vaporware.

The Original Vantablack Problem

The original Vantablack was a technological marvel and a commercial dead end. Developed by Surrey NanoSystems in the UK, the material relied on billions of vertically aligned carbon nanotubes—an intricate, expensive manufacturing process that made it impractical for automotive production. It looked incredible in concept cars. As an actual option on a showroom vehicle? Forget it.

That’s where the Chinese researchers stepped in. Zhiwei Liu, Changyi Pan, and Jet Cui figured out that you don’t need to engineer nanotubes in-house if you can source them cheaply and stack them smartly. Their formula combines off-the-shelf nanoscale carbon black particles with commercially available carbon nanotubes, mixed into a liquid suspension with deionized water, dispersant, and a deformer.

The result: a paint that absorbs more than 99.90 percent of light. Close enough to Vantablack to make enthusiasts care. Different enough to potentially scale to production volumes.

How the Paint Actually Works

Here‘s where it gets clever. The carbon black particles settle along the nanotubes, creating an irregular surface textured with microscopic peaks and valleys. When light hits that bumpy landscape, it doesn’t bounce cleanly back toward your eye. Instead, it bounces around inside those tiny crevices, getting absorbed with each internal reflection.

It’s the same principle that makes Vantablack work—just achieved through a simpler, less finicky manufacturing method. Instead of growing aligned nanotubes in a lab, you’re mixing things that already exist and letting physics do the rest.

The Durability Tests—and Why They Matter

The researchers published their findings in Matter & Light and included crucial stress tests that manufacturers actually care about. Paint panels were exposed to 95 percent humidity at 40°C (104°F) for extended periods. Other samples were submerged in water for 10 full days. Both survived without visible degradation.

That’s important because Vantablack has always failed the real-world durability question. A fancy paint that looks like a portal to the void is worthless if it delaminates after your first car wash or flakes off when a rock chips it.

But here’s the catch: passing humidity and saltwater tests is table stakes. Before any manufacturer touches this for production, they’ll demand proof it can handle UV exposure, resist scratching, survive acid rain, and withstand the kind of rock chips that come from highway driving. The researchers haven’t released data on those fronts yet.

Why This Matters (and Why It Still Probably Won’t Happen)

The gap between lab success and production reality is where most breakthrough materials die. Car manufacturers are notoriously conservative about paint finishes—they’ve spent decades developing clear coats, adhesion primers, and curing processes that they understand completely. A new formula means revalidating everything: spray guns, oven settings, environmental controls, quality control standards.

There’s also the question of cost. If this paint is genuinely cheaper to produce than Vantablack, the pricing advantage might vanish once you factor in OEM validation, liability insurance, warranty coverage, and the paint booth adjustments required. Car companies mark up specialty finishes aggressively—if the base material is cheap but the approval process is expensive, the end-user cost might not be that much lower than exotic alternatives already available.

That said, the fact that a credible research team has published peer-reviewed data showing a Vantablack-adjacent paint that survives real-world durability testing is genuinely noteworthy. Five years ago, this wasn’t considered possible. The door that BMW kept locked in 2019 just cracked open a little bit.

What Comes Next

Don’t expect to order your next car in ultra-black tomorrow. The researchers themselves are clear: this study was designed to test adhesion and basic durability, not to prove commercial viability. There are still mountains of testing required—UV resistance, salt spray corrosion tests (per NHTSA standards), multi-layer adhesion validation, and real-world field trials.

But the fact that someone is seriously pursuing this—publishing rigorous data, solving the manufacturability problem that killed Vantablack—suggests that the ultra-black paint arms race is no longer dormant. Whether it’s a Chinese lab, a paint supplier looking for a breakthrough, or a luxury brand deciding the PR is finally worth the R&D spend, we’re likely closer to a production ultra-black option than we were in 2019.

The car that becomes the first production model wearing a paint that absorbs 99.9 percent of light is going to be absolutely unhinged. It’ll photograph like a cutout. It’ll make every other finish look pedestrian. And yes, someone will definitely scratch it within the first month of ownership. Worth it.

Sources: Carscoops