Why a $15,950 Tourbillon Watch Is Considered a Steal

With a price tag of $15,950, the new Carrera Heuer-02T wristwatch from TAG Heuer — a brand often associated with “starter” Swiss luxury watches under $3,000 — may strike budget-minded consumers as “mind boggling,” as one watch site, Monochrome, put it; perhaps even “incredible,” in the words of another, Hodinkee.

An entry-level timepiece for the price of a factory-fresh Japanese subcompact? I’ll take the Honda.

To the watch cultists who inhabit sites like these, however, the new TAG is not an egregious example of price gouging but rather a steal, a timepiece so jaw-droppingly underpriced that there must be, according to the site aBlogtoWatch, some sort of sorcery involved.

What the wizards at TAG have done is conjure a tourbillon — an intricate, gyroscope-like mechanism long considered a holy grail for watch enthusiasts — at the luxury-watch equivalent of a Kmart bluelight price.

Up to now, a (ahem) “cheap” tourbillon timepiece was the Montblanc 4810 ExoTourbillon Slim, for $34,500. At the G.D.P.-of-a-small-country end of the spectrum, the Greubel-Forsey Quadruple Tourbillon (which, yes, contains four of them) retails for $815,000.

TAG, in other words, has seemingly enabled buyers to take that Honda budget and snag a Bentley.

But is it worth it? You don’t have to explain to anyone why a Bentley costs so much. But a tourbillon? How could a feather’s weight of metal increase the value of an already expensive watch by a factor of 10?

For starters, a tourbillon promises at least a theoretical improvement in performance. To put things in watch-geek-ese, the tourbillon, which was pioneered by Abraham-Louis Breguet at the end of the 18th century, mounts the watch’s escapement, balance spring and balance wheel inside a tiny rotating cage, to fight the effects of gravity, and in theory even out minor deviations in timekeeping (phew).