Lamborghini Watches: A Brand Too Far, Now On Clearance

Full disclosure: I’m a huge Lamborghini fan. Enough of a fan that I can get a little worked up about the brand’s directional wobbles over the past decade. Make no mistake, though: if my budget would stretch to a Murcielago, I’d have one. (About the Aventador, I’m a bit diffident.) Ferrari’s transformation from manufacturer of unreliable but pretty cars to merchandising machine and tyrannical allocation scheme has made Lamborghini seem much cooler by comparison. The clinical precision of the Gallardo makes the Dino-successor Ferraris look a bit try-hard and the big twelve-cylinder supercars have the swagger that the FF, 612, and F12berlinetta seem to be deliberately avoiding.

But there are times that one simply wants to turn one’s head away from the catastrophe that is Lambo’s Ferrari-aping merch scheme, and this is one of them.

With that said, the Venn diagram of the buyers for expensive supercars and ridiculous watches is pretty much a circle, so it stands to reason that for every exotic car, there will be a somewhat less exotic watch. It has to be less exotic than the car because there’s also a merch possibility for the proles who can’t get the car just yet, and also because the very best watchmakers have too much pride to let something like that happen.

Ferrari started their time in the watch game with the staid but impeccably respectable Girard-Perregaux before bowing to their customer’s true demographic and moving the brand to quick-bake reboot and Sly Stallone favorite, Panerai. In 2010 those two brands parted ways and Ferrari started a house-brand watch lineup featuring “Swiss movements” with what the hardcore watch fanatics say is a heavy dose of Chinese componentry and assembly.

That takes care of the proles and the F1 team fans, leaving the company free to make a second deal with Hublot in which the Ferrari name is applied to some of the world’s most loathsome timekeeping instruments. It’s a neat trick, really. There’s a $599 watch for the guy who will never own a Ferrari, and the $22,000 watch for the guy who has two of them and is in the queue for his next one.

As is usually the case, Lamborghini isn’t that deft. Their choice was to partner with mid-level generic-luxury brand Tonino to create a line of $1500-3500 watches with the Lamborghini brand applied. Unlike the high-end Ferrari watches from G-P, Hublot, and Panerai, the Tonino Lambo watches come in every possible size and style, thus removing any chance that someone might recognize the watch without putting their face ten inches from the dial. As far as I can tell, the watches are existing Toninos with a bull at the twelve-o-clock mark.

The resulting products are neither compelling nor particularly cheap, thus ensuring that they won’t be bought by Lamborghini owners or Lamborghini fans. Being among the latter is tough anyway; if you get caught prancing around in a full Rosso Corsa outfit by your friends, you can always say you’re a fan of the race team, but if you’re wearing Lamborghini clothing and you don’t have a Lamborghini, you’d be better off staying in the house.

No surprise, then, that the discount website Touch Of Modern is half-pricing Lambo watches this week. No need to rush; they have plenty of them. I can only imagine one possible reason to purchase one, and that would be an attempt to humiliate yourself into accelerating the purchase of that nicely patinated ’04 with the crappy e-gear and the Audi 100 climate controls. If that’s why, then by all means, get the yellow watch, too!