Or for that matter, small wheel rims on a sports car.

(Or, as Jeremy Clarkson put it: “ with a well-designed car, every good line connects with another good line”.) That means you’ll never see a well-designed car with equally long front and rear ends, for example.

Good design is always balanced, connecting all the striking visual elements in a coherent style. That word was rarely aerodynamics or practicality. And nearly every car designer I spoke to brought up the same word to describe good design. In my years as an editor at Esquire, I’ve written quite a few articles on car design. The small price difference between the two (just EUR 600) clearly indicates that Cartier wanted to avoid the pitfall of creating a downsized, cheaper brother. That’s always a bit tricky a smaller version of any luxury product is almost always the poor man’s choice. The Parisians went one step further with the sizes offering the Santos in a large and mid-size format. TWO SIZES, same proportionsīut Cartier didn’t stop with the different bracelet options. We tested it for a few minutes and the function is simple, smart and well-executed. Push, release, remove the extra link, insert it again and it’s fixed. By pressing a small oval push-piece on the underside of the links, a bar is released without the need of a screwdriver. The length of the bracelet can also be adjusted by what Cartier calls its SmartLinks. This definitely isn’t the case with the Santos, where the bracelet has been an essential design element since its first edition in 1904. This is not a small accomplishment more and more watch brands these days have exchangeable straps, but often the fixation feels a bit flimsy. Every watch comes with one extra strap (one steel, one leather), that is easy to change. One of the coolest details on the new Santos watch is the bracelet system. The entire collection is built on that strong foundation and turned out to be both aesthetically and commercially interesting. The famed Parisian Maison not only recognized the potential for such a statement watch, but it also put the right price tag on it: EUR 6,000-7,000.

Cartier calibre diver forum