The vintage revenge of the car clock

Anyone who loves watches knows that a beautiful mechanical chronograph has a charm that no “quartz” can ever have; even today, in times of smartwatches, no one denies that digital does many things and better, but if you look at the dial of a precious Patek Philippe or a Franck Muller (a matter of taste, of course, each has its ideal wristwatch) the fact that it marks the time and only that is not what justifies the choice.

We are talking about aesthetic culture and what we are used to considering “beautiful” even regardless of function and the car is one of the most sensational cases in which technology has not succeeded in undermining traditional taste but, at most, has declined it in more or less evolved ways.

to appreciate the environment, the furnishings and establish visual contact between you and the “car”. From this point of view the “furniture” are the controls and what technically continues to be called instrumentation even if, as in the case of watches, functions and looks have evolved in a radical way.

The dashboard can be said to be as old as the car, at least since the simple wooden bulkhead that delimited the passenger compartment in front of the driver became the support for everything that could be used to check or operate the mechanics; and the more the mechanics were complex, the more numerous and complex were the instruments that were placed on the dashboard.