The X Of Y
If you’re a car company with an eye for design excellence, chances are you’ll want to spread your wings at some point and expand your brand footprint with bespoke limited runs of products that speak to your identity. Yachts are a given, but what about everything else? Here are a couple of offerings from the luxury-car market to bling out every other part of your life.
The McLaren of Golf Clubs
McLaren has drawn on its super-sports-car ethos and worked with golf-industry specialists and world-class engineers to produce a fine collection of clubs and kit. Metal injection moulding, which is apparently rarely used at scale in golf due to its complexity and cost, gives the engineers precise control over material composition, internal geometry and mass distribution. The collection comprises the Series 1 and Series 3. Both are imbued with McLaren Structural Mesh, an intricate external architecture that redistributes mass away from non-critical areas while maintaining structural strength. This allows for increased stability and forgiveness while preserving a clean profile.
The Series 1 is a tour blade with a clean, compact profile, designed for the skilled player who values shot-making above all else. The Series 3 features a carbon-fibre bonnet along the back of the iron as an aesthetic nod to the brand’s racing and automotive heritage. Now we can finally take a McLaren onto the green.
The Honda of Watches
Citizen has collaborated with Honda to bring back a stone-cold classic, the Ana-Digi Temp, an analogue-digital watch from 1982 inspired by a car dashboard. All this is in service of the return of the Honda Prelude. Available in black or white, only 200 of each have been made, with an RRP of $777. They don’t break the bank, but they will be hard to get hold of. The 32.5 mm stainless-steel case contains a number of displays, including day and date, a 12/24-hour display, a 1/1000-second chronograph, dual time and a thermometer, just for fun. So you know how hot your wrist is. It may not be a TAG Heuer, but it’s still neat.
The Bugatti of TVs
My problem with TVs is that they demand to be the centrepiece of your home. You put one in a lounge and suddenly you’re obliged to face a couch towards it. The entire living space becomes oriented around the blasted thing. When guests come over, you end up twisting around in your seat to face them. They are a secondary consideration. It’s gross.
Bugatti seemingly shares my disgust for screens. Check out the Bugatti Tourbillon, a luxury vehicle that symbolises a new era of screen detox. Its dashboard is entirely analogue. No crappy Android tablets embedded in it, just a pure driving experience. Luxury these days is being able to escape screens.
So imagine C SEED’s dilemma when it was tasked with designing a TV inspired by the Bugatti Tourbillon. Most TVs are just a square on a wall with a sliver of a border. How do you redesign that? The best TV in this instance would be no TV at all. That’s exactly what they did.
In its inert state, the C SEED Bugatti N1 is nothing more than a silver-finished cabinet that looks like a sideboard. Press a button and it rises and unfolds into a 110- or 137-inch 4K MicroLED TV. If that sounds weird, well, that’s because it is. It’s also incredibly cool. They’ve moulded a TV to fit Bugatti’s philosophy of ‘Art, Forme, Technique’, which it delivers in spades. It’s an incredible piece of engineering and balanced motion. The C SEED Bugatti N1 features 180-degree screen rotation and an optional centre-sliding mechanism, allowing the display to adapt effortlessly to sophisticated living environments. It accommodates you, not the other way around. Once unfolded, it extends its sound system, which retracts when not in use. Since it is made up of several panels, you might expect distracting seams. C SEED’s advanced MicroLED processing and Adaptive Gap Calibration ensure seamless panel transitions and a unified picture.
I love it.
bugatti.com/en/lifestyle/c-seed
The Lamborghini of Computers
Meet the Tonino Lamborghini TECNO TAURUS, the successor to the MEGA MINI G1, which is touted as “the world’s first and smallest water-cooled gaming PC”. I’m not sure about that, but the latest model continues the tradition with a sleek, all-metal build styled around Tonino Lamborghini. It comes with an Intel® Core™ i9-13900HK processor with 14 cores and 20 threads, with a clock speed of up to 5.4 GHz. The GPU is an NVIDIA® GeForce RTX 5060 with 8 GB of GDDR7 memory. A screen on top of the case keeps you informed of the PC’s performance, and the creators promise silent running thanks to a pure-copper water-cooled cold plate and a triple-fan setup if that doesn’t cut it. It has 15 ports, Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.4, while power is supplied through an external 330 W GaN adapter.
This isn’t the only collaboration between the two brands. They also have a gaming phone, a laptop and earbuds. All your tech could have Lamborghini on it as you drive around in your Holden.