Cartier Cheich: Why This Quartz Watch Sold for $3.4 Million
– 1 min read
A Cartier wristwatch powered by quartz has just established the maison’s auction record. On 18 September 2026, Sotheby’s Hong Kong sold a unique white-gold Cartier Cheich for HK$26.52 million, approximately US$3.4 million including fees.
The result is notable precisely because mechanical complexity is not the story. The Cheich is a 38mm white-gold watch with a jewelled quartz calibre, commissioned in 2010 by Italian collector Giorgio Seragnoli and marked No. 1 of 1. Seragnoli was a co-author of Cartier Bianco and a major collector of white-metal Cartier watches.
Its importance begins earlier. The Cheich was conceived in connection with Cartier’s Challenge, created around the Paris-Dakar Rally. Competitors who won the race in consecutive years were to receive a specially made Cartier watch rather than a conventional trophy. The challenge ended after rally founder Thierry Sabine died in 1986. Only a handful of original Cheich watches were produced, and Sotheby’s identifies five known examples today, including the 2010 Seragnoli commission.
The new Cartier Cheich auction record displaced the previous benchmark set by a rare Cartier London Crash. That watch achieved CHF 1.585 million, or US$2.029 million, at Christie’s Geneva in May 2026.
The comparison is revealing. The Cheich result does not demonstrate that quartz has overtaken mechanical watchmaking. It shows how, in an exceptional collecting case, rarity, design authorship, provenance and historical association can outweigh movement architecture.
For Cartier collectors, the $3.4 million result therefore belongs less to the quartz-versus-mechanical debate than to the market for singular objects with a documented story.
