Collaboration Nation: The Bugatti Tourbillon Inspired C SEED Bugatti N1 Television

Buckle up, buttercup, this one gets complicated fast.

When last we met it was for a discussion of the pros, cons, risks, and benefits of collaborations, and we looked specifically at the collaboration between Ferrari, and Jony Ive’s design studio, LoveFrom (which has a rather enigmatic website almost totally devoid of information, and perhaps one message among many that this sends, is that if you need a “contact us” form to contact Jony Ive, the odds are very good that you are not a suitable client for Jony Ive.)

The collaboration du jour is one that was announced June 2nd, and it is a partnership between one company I’ve heard a lot about – Bugatti – and another company I’ve never heard about before, which is a company called C SEED (styled without a hyphen and, of course, ALL CAPS). C SEED was founded in 2013 for the purpose of making the ultimate luxury television, which is an interesting position to take since a 65 inch OLED TV right now, is about a two thousand dollar proposition and the technology feels pretty mature at this point.

However, if mature technology executed with obsessive attention to detail and priced to announce, as if we needed it announced any more, that if you need to ask the price you can’t afford it, were a thing no one wanted, then we wouldn’t be having this conversation at all, I suppose.

C SEED televisions are televisions in the same way that the Jacob & Co. Bugatti Tourbillon is a watch, or that the Bugatti Tourbillon car is a car – they are extravagantly over-engineered; one model, designed for super yachts, comes in at 201 diagonal inches and over four meters wide, with a display so bright that C SEED guarantees its visibility in broad Mediterranean daylight.

All of C SPEEDs televisions are designed to unfold from a hidden base, and the process of watching it do so is possibly more interesting than a lot of stuff you might watch on the TV itself.

Now, one of the elements of a successful collaboration is often – although not always – the element of surprise and certainly the idea of a collaboration between a hypercar company and a TV manufacturer was pretty surprising to me. There are few things more ordinary than televisions these days – I was going to say “quotidian” but they’re so blandly ubiquitous the word seems overblown – and however you might feel about Bugatti in its current incarnation, they’re not exactly bland and definitely not ubiquitous. I have been inside one exactly once, when the Veyron launched in the United States and since my mother drove a Volkswagen Beetle when I was a kid, I was completely overwhelmed by the luxury and power of the Veyron (although now that I think of it, Bugatti was revived by Volkswagen, so there is at least a tenuous connection between my youth and the world of luxury automobiles … it’s thin, though).

I think for a watch enthusiast, however, one of the most interesting features of this collaboration, of which there are many, is having a connection between a half million dollar television set, and a four million dollar hypercar, which is named for a delicate regulating device invented two and a quarter centuries ago.