Even Tom Brady Is a Cartier Crash Fanboy Now

Given his extensive collection of some of the world’s finest watches, it was only a matter of time before we spotted Tom Brady in a Cartier Crash. Effortlessly cool, outrageously valuable, and rarer than a biblical artifact from an Indiana Jones screenplay, the Crash is the It watch of 2024—and arguably 2023 and 2022, while we’re at it. And while some of Brady’s watches may be more objectively special given their configurations and limited availability, none has quite the cachet of this most special Cartier.

All sorts of legends have cropped up attesting to the origins of the Cartier Crash. Famous among them is one in which a Cartier Maxi Oval was involved in a terrible car crash—one so violent that the resulting fire distorted its ovular shape into a dripping, avant-garde contour that was subsequently adapted by the maison into an entire collection. Yet another horological theory holds that Cartier London was inspired by the strange “melting” pocket watches in Salvador Dali’s The Persistence of Memory, using them as the basis for a fresh take on the Tank.

Neither story, unfortunately, is true. Rather, some combination of intelligent forethought and the desires of acclaimed British thespian Stewart Grainer—who requested, in typical watch industry fashion, a “watch unlike any other”—moved Jean-Jacques Cartier to conceive of a more whimsical Cartier timepiece.

He approached Rupert Emmerson, part of Cartier London’s design team, and described a watch that would be made by “pinching the ends at a point and pulling a kink in the middle.” Sounds simple enough, right? Wrong. The prototyping phase went through several iterations, and then the metalworkers at Wright & Davies had to fashion the precious metal cases by hand. And when Cartier London head watchmaker Eric Denton tried to fit the hand-wound Jaeger-LeCoultre movements into said cases, the hands didn’t line up with the correct time. Again and again they tried, until finally, in 1967, they had the first working Crash on their hands.

Ironically, Grainger reportedly found it too “unusual and impractical.” Cartier London made only a dozen or so pieces of this original run, selling them for $1,000 or so—roughly $9,000 today. (Cue: writer sobbing uncontrollably at his desk.) Cartier London was eventually sold outside of the family, and by the time the next run of Crashes were produced in the 1980s, they sported “Paris”-signed dials. Later, in the ’90s, about 400 were made, while in 2010, the maison released a hand-wound, skeletonized version. But it was in 2019, when Cartier’s London boutique began selling the Ref. WGCH0006—effectively a modern take on the original Crash— that things really started to heat up.

Fast-forward to 2024, when a run-of-the-mill, solid-gold, hand-wound Tank Louis costs about $13,000. A Crash—which is supposedly produced today at the rate of roughly one per month—is a six-figure proposition reserved for the company’s best clients. And if you want an original, London-signed version from the swinging sixties? Well, let’s put it this way: Do you have $1.65 million to spare?