New Bugatti watch costs more than a house
The Buggati Chiron is the world’s fastest production car by a comfortable margin – with a top speed of 490km/h – or 304mph in the old money, and a price tag of $USD3.5 million not including taxes.
Now there’s a watch named after it with an equally astronomical price.
The watch is called a Twin Turbo Furious 300+ (a reference to the 300mph target) and only three will be made.
According to The Robb Report, the Twin Turbo Furious 300+ made by Swiss watch maker Jacob & Co is listed at $USD580,000, which equates to $AUD844,000 at today’s exchange rates.
This is more than twice the price of an earlier Bugatti edition of a Jacob & Co watch, the $USD280,000 Chiron Super Sport 300+, of which 30 were made.
The same money would also buy a couple of top-end Porsche 911s or a modest house on the fringes of an Australian capital city. Ok, maybe a bit further than the fringes.
According to the video, the Twin Turbo Furious Bugatti 300+ “is a true grand complication in a sporting package, combining two triple-axis high-speed tourbillons with a decimal minute repeater and a mono-pusher chronograph with pit board reference time”.
Despite my many socially awkward moments in life, I have no idea what a “grand complication” is, but managed to find out the watch has 832 moving parts, in addition to the 88 parts that comprise the case.
Tourbillon is French for “whirlwind”, according to Wikipedia, which in the parlance is “an addition to the mechanics of a watch escapement to increase accuracy.”
“In a tourbillon the escapement and balance wheel are mounted in a rotating cage, in order to negate the effects of gravity when the timepiece is stuck in a certain position,” Wikipedia continued.
“By continuously rotating the entire balance wheel/escapement assembly at a slow rate (typically about one revolution per minute), the tourbillon averages out positional errors,” says the crowd-sourced website.
And in case you think “escapement” is a typo for “escarpment”, it isn’t.
In fact it is a “mechanical linkage in mechanical watches and clocks that gives impulses to the timekeeping element which periodically releases the gear train to move forward, advancing the clock's hands”.
At least I was able to guess one aspect of this watch. By using the term “pit board”, Jacob & Co is referencing a motor racing pit board, that drivers can glance at as they speed past on each lap. Ok, that I can follow.
In case you buy one of these watches, it could be worth knowing it has a 50-hour back up battery.
And, of course, we couldn’t complete a story about expensive watches without the tired old question: “don’t you know your phone has a clock on it?”.
We’ll try harder net time to avoid the mobile phone references. But seriously, $USD580,000 for a watch?