- the bugatti partnership with jacob & co. is only a year old, but this is the third watch to come from it so far.
- with a price of $280,000, there are a lot of features to talk about.
- for instance, it has a shrunken version of the bugatti chiron's 16-cylinder engine that actually moves and is suspended on tiny shocks.
if you're going to wear a crazy-expensive watch, it makes sense to choose one that simply epitomizes the pure pointlessness of a crazy-expensive watch. for example, this new "high-complication timepiece" from jacob & co features a miniaturized w-16 engine from the bugatti chiron. sure, the watch costs $280,000, but, hey, look at all those moving pieces.
to be sure, there is a lot of precise engineering at work in this chiron-inspired wrist clock, which is officially called the bugatti chiron 16 cylinder tourbillon. the actual chiron has a 1500-hp 8.0-liter 16-cylinder engine, which means that jacob & co's designers worked to get 16 tiny pistons that move a minuscule solid steel crankshaft as the focal point. that crankshaft is "one of the smallest and most complicated watch parts ever manufactured," the company says.
that's just the kind of challenge that jacob & co designers seem to relish. jacob & co announced a partnership with bugatti in march 2019, and company founder jacob arabo said at the time that the chiron represented "perfectly refined engineering." the watchmaker has already released two other bugatti-inspired timepieces, the twin turbo furious bugatti, of which only 18 were made, and the more widely available epic x chrono carbon bugatti (110 pieces). jacob & co has not yet announced how many chiron watches it will make.
however many get produced, the tiny engine in the watch doesn't always spin—"one push of the launch button and off it goes," jacob & co says—but to make sure you can see all those moving pieces when they do move, the watch has sapphire crystals on the top and sides. the watch movement is suspended in four places, thanks to pieces that look like shrunken shocks from the chiron itself, jacob & co says.
the sapphire crystal window that shows off the 16-cylinder tourbillon (that's watchmaker-speak for a device that was originally added to watches to improve accuracy but is today more of a " novelty and a demonstration of watchmaking virtuosity," as wikipedia puts it) is even modeled after bugatti's horseshoe grill. the crystals are housed in a 54-by-44-millimeter titanium case that was "inspired by the flowing lines of the chiron," and there are tiny bugatti logos as well. in other words, this watch takes a lot of cues from the $3 million chiron and puts them on your wrist.
there's another fitting comparison between the watch and the car, since a watch is about the only thing that will fit into the actual chiron's tiny trunk.