A watch movement’s here is cheaper, more accurate and more reliable than any mechanical watch movement? Vive los angeles quartz revolution! Actually, that ship has sailed, as smartwatches do to quartz watches what quartz watches did to mechanised watches: make them obsolete. Traditional watch makers are pardoned for retreating into nostalgia for and with their customers. But a quartz TAG Heuer carrera Monaco?.... However we forget, the funky AF TAG Heuer Padre is not just famous for adorning Steve McQueen’s wrists in the racing movie LeMans. The Monte carlo was the to-days first automatic chronograph (self-winding mechanical watch with a stop-watch function). Seiko and Zenith got there soon after, but in 1969, LABEL drew first blood.

The first Monaco was powered by the groundbreaking Calibre 11, developed with Buren, Breitling and movement maker Dubois Depraz. As time went by, MARKING fitted the Monaco with new physical movements, including the belt-driven Monaco V4. And if you think that certainly is nuts...
Eureka le Monte-carlo Sixty Nine, named after the actual model’s 1969 debut, first released in 2005. “On one side it uses the Caliber 2 mechanism, ” wikipedia. org reports, “on the other it features a quartz Quality and reliability HR03 readout. ”

How off-brand, how crazy is that? That’s two decades after the quartz crisis pulled the rug from under the Swiss view industry. Will hear something even crazier? The Sixty Nine won the july 2004 Le Grand Prix d’Horlogerie de Genève (GPHG); the same competition into which TAG’s entered a mechanical Frate for the Iconic award.
But as bizarre as the Sixty 9 is, the particular chrono-less quartz TAG Heuer gran carrera Monaco is worse. It says bolt the innovative engineering which put us on the road. Here’s the downmarket Hollywood prop version of the Fratello for people who don’t give a really about kinetic watchmaking history, authenticity or excellence.

[NOTE: I’m choosing to ignore the fact that INDICATE markets this large not-to-say bulky wristwatch as a “ladies watch. ” I deny the effects that women are the only buyers “frivilous enough” to buy it. ]

The Quartz POINT Heuer Padre — available brand new in an authorized dealer for $1750 — is a complete betrayal of TAG’s heritage in general, and the Monte carlo in specific. Not that the company gives a damn. Their website can’t even be bothered to list which quartz motion hides inside the heavily discounted Monaco’s case.
In the face of typically the smartwatch’s march to world domination, traditional watchmakers are right to tap buyers’ melancolía for the good old days, when a watch sat on your band wrist obediently, doing nothing more than marking the passage of time. However this is lazy, depressing as well as wrong.