BMW’s fifth generation X5 has just landed, bringing with it a wider factory colour palette that includes a striking shade called Vancouver Green. German customisation house LARTE Design wasted no time putting its own spin on the hue, building a widebody BMW X5M Competition that wears Vancouver Green not as paint, but as the actual colour of its dry carbon bodywork.
What Makes This Build Different
Most manufacturers offer buyers a fixed menu of colours, wheels, and trim combinations. LARTE Design refers to what happens after that menu runs out as “Customisation Level 2”, essentially a full exterior redesign built around one specific car and one specific owner. In this case the base X5M Competition arrived in white, with LARTE’s widebody kit fitted over it in 100 percent dry carbon fibre finished in Vancouver Green. The brand is quick to point out that the colour choice isn’t fixed either. Vancouver Green was simply the starting point for this build, and any other shade can be specified and manufactured to order.
Inside the Widebody Kit
The kit itself consists of 13 separate components, including a new front bumper, bonnet, fender extensions, side skirts, rear diffuser, and a rear spoiler. Every piece is engineered around the factory dimensions of the X5M Competition and manufactured entirely in house at LARTE’s facility in Erkrath, Germany.
The visual impact goes beyond a set of add on panels. The kit pulls the SUV’s stance lower and wider across every body line, trading the standard car’s tall, upright proportions for something flatter and more continuous. Paired with the white base colour, the green carbon panels sharpen the car’s silhouette rather than dressing it up, making the whole body read as a single shape instead of a collection of bolted on parts.
How the Colour Gets Into the Carbon
Each component starts life as a hand shaped clay model, sculpted directly against the actual car before being 3D scanned and prototyped. From there the panels are laid up using dry carbon pre preg material and cured in an autoclave under controlled heat and pressure, the same basic process major manufacturers use for their own visible carbon parts.
Where colour is part of the design, it’s woven into the carbon fibre itself during this stage rather than sprayed on afterwards, so what you’re looking at on the finished panel is the raw material colour, not a paint layer sitting on top of it. Every component receives a Class A surface finish and TÜV certification, and the bonnet carries additional Teilegutachten approval, which is Germany’s formal part specific homologation certificate.
Fitment and Compatibility
Installation uses the car’s existing factory mounting points, so there’s no drilling and no structural alterations involved. The full kit goes on in around six hours and is fully compatible with the X5M Competition’s sensors and driver assistance systems, with no impact on the manufacturer’s warranty. Depending on the model generation, production takes between 10 and 18 days.
One Programme Across BMW’s SUV Lineup
This X5M Competition build is just one entry in a much broader LARTE Design programme that spans BMW’s SUV and performance range, covering the X5 (G05, built 2019 to 2023, and the facelifted G05 LCI from 2023 to 2026), the X5M Competition, the X6 and X6M Competition, the X7, the XM, and even the 7 Series. Every model in the lineup follows the same approach: a fully reimagined dry carbon exterior finished in a colour worked out directly with the owner rather than picked from a standard options list.
What’s Next for LARTE Design
With BMW’s fifth generation X5 introducing a new design language for the model, LARTE Design has confirmed it’s already exploring what Customisation Level 2 will look like for the updated car, with the next phase of the programme expected to begin as soon as the new generation reaches dealers.
