In Schaffhausen in 1868, the future of mechanical timekeeping began beside the Rhine. Florentine Ariosto Jones, a young American engineer and watchmaker, crossed the Atlantic with an audacious proposition: combine the precision and industrial discipline of American manufacturing with the handcraft of Swiss watchmaking.
Eighteen years later, Carl Benz patented his Motorwagen, while Gottlieb Daimler developed his motorised carriage shortly afterwards. Mercedes-Benz now rightly traces the birth of the automobile to 1886, and 2026 marks 140 years of that disruptive idea.
It is difficult to imagine a more natural meeting of minds.
One company learned to make machinery small enough to wear. The other learned to make machinery powerful enough to move the world. Both discovered, rather early, that engineering becomes truly meaningful when technical excellence disappears into effortless performance.
That shared philosophy has now produced the IWC Schaffhausen Big Pilot’s Watch Perpetual Calendar ProSet 140 Years Mercedes-Benz, Reference IW329603: a 140-piece limited edition created to commemorate Mercedes-Benz’s anniversary and a partnership that stretches from AMG performance cars to Formula One.
And this is not merely another commemorative watch with an automotive logo discreetly placed somewhere on the case. It is considerably more interesting than that.
The Partnership Becomes Mechanical
IWC became a partner of Mercedes-AMG in 2004, establishing a relationship based on performance, precision and design. In 2013, that relationship moved decisively into Formula One when IWC became Official Engineering Partner of the Mercedes-AMG PETRONAS Formula One Team.
For IWC CEO Chris Grainger-Herr, the relationship has evolved beyond commercial association:
“For 22 years, we have been part of the Mercedes-Benz brand universe – and what began as a partnership has grown into a friendship, built on mutual respect and deep admiration for each other´s work. Our collaboration is rooted in shared values: a passion for world-class engineering, uncompromising performance, and visionary design. We warmly congratulate Mercedes-Benz on this company anniversary and look forward to many more years and more exciting projects together.”
“Since 1886, Mercedes-Benz has never simply measured time, but defined eras. Together with IWC Schaffhausen, we celebrate a shared belief that true progress is born from craftsmanship, innovation, and attention to every detail. The limited-edition Big Pilot’s Watch honors a partnership built on these values and reflects the enduring spirit that drives both our brands forward.”
Those words are not marketing poetry without mechanical substance. The watch itself provides the evidence.
The Complication That Changes The Rules
At its heart is IWC’s new Perpetual Calendar ProSet, a particularly clever reinvention of one of haute horlogerie’s most demanding complications.
Traditional perpetual calendars are notoriously intimidating to reset. ProSet takes the opposite approach. Its entirely gear-based mechanism, protected by four patents, allows the calendar to be adjusted both forwards and backwards through a single crown position. No additional correctors. No changing crown positions. No complicated sequence of operations.
It sounds obvious. It isn’t.
Making a highly complicated mechanical calendar behave with the intuitive simplicity of setting the time is precisely the kind of engineering challenge IWC has historically embraced. The mechanism’s intricate geometries are manufactured using LIGA, an advanced lithography-and-electroforming process.
The result is watchmaking with an unusually satisfying paradox: enormous mechanical complexity presented to the owner as simplicity.
The calendar displays the date at three o’clock, month at six, day at nine and the moon phase at twelve. Between seven and eight sits IWC’s distinctive four-digit year display.
The Double Moon® indication represents the lunar cycle for both hemispheres and will deviate by only one day every 1,040 years.
This is where the watch becomes more than an anniversary object. It becomes a statement about what modern mechanical watchmaking should be doing: not simply preserving complications, but making them better.
A Big Pilot With Executive Restraint
At 42mm, the stainless-steel case is substantially more restrained than the monumental 46mm Big Pilot introduced by IWC in 2002. Its combination of brushed and polished surfaces gives the case enough visual authority without descending into theatrical excess.
The black dial is the perfect counterpoint: clean, severe and unmistakably instrumental. Gold appliqués and gold-plated hands inject warmth, while the white minute track maintains the legibility expected of an IWC Pilot’s Watch.
Beneath the sapphire crystal case back sits the historical 1926 Mercedes-Benz emblem — the laurel wreath inherited from Benz surrounding Daimler’s three-pointed star — elegantly connecting the watch to the moment when the two companies became one.
It is a particularly intelligent design decision. Instead of decorating the dial with overt automotive symbolism, IWC places history where the collector will discover it: on the reverse, almost like a mechanical footnote.
The black rubber strap, meanwhile, keeps the watch contemporary and practical, while IWC’s EasX-CHANGE® system allows it to be changed without tools. The case is water-resistant to 10 bar.
The Engine Beneath The Bonnet
Power comes from IWC’s manufacture Calibre 82665, an automatic movement operating at 4Hz with 280 components and a 60-hour power reserve.
Its bidirectional Pellaton winding system uses ceramic components, while a nickel-phosphorus escapement and silicon hairspring reinforce the movement’s resistance to wear and magnetic influence.
This is where the automotive analogy becomes irresistible.
The ProSet’s achievement is not that it contains a perpetual calendar; IWC has been doing that since Kurt Klaus’s landmark 1985 Da Vinci perpetual calendar. Its achievement is making that complication substantially more intuitive.
That is engineering thinking.
Why Cars And Watches Have Always Belonged Together?
The relationship between automobiles and mechanical watches is deeper than shared clientele or sponsorship budgets.
Both disciplines evolved around the human need to measure, control and optimise motion. Before GPS, telemetry and digital dashboards, the chronograph was an analogue performance instrument.
A tachymeter scale could transform elapsed time over a known distance into average speed: start the chronograph as a car crosses one marker, stop it at another, and read the speed directly from the scale.
The ergonomics matter, too. A good automotive instrument must communicate instantly, without demanding intellectual effort from someone travelling at speed. So must a professional watch.
Large numerals, strong contrast, tactile pushers and intuitive displays are not aesthetic accidents; they are solutions to human behaviour under pressure.
This is why motorsport gave the mechanical chronograph such cultural power. The watch ceased to be merely an instrument and became an extension of the machine — worn by drivers, engineers, team principals and enthusiasts who understood that fractions of a second could separate victory from defeat.
IWC’s motorsport relationship operates in precisely this territory. Its Performance Chronographs employ tachymeter scales to translate time measurement into speed, while its Mercedes-AMG and Formula One partnerships place the watchmaker inside an ecosystem where engineering is tested not in a showroom but under extraordinary pressure.
And that is the fascinating double-edged advantage of this alliance.
Mercedes-Benz gains horological credibility: a physical, mechanical expression of its engineering heritage that can live on the wrist long after a particular automobile has disappeared from the showroom.
IWC gains access to the emotional theatre of speed, competition and automotive mythology. Formula One supplies adrenaline; Mercedes-Benz supplies technological prestige; IWC supplies mechanical intimacy.
The two brands therefore amplify something neither could manufacture alone.
From Jones To ProSet
That continuity is what makes the IW329603 compelling.
Jones founded IWC upon the conviction that advanced engineering and traditional craftsmanship need not be opposing forces. IWC subsequently built its reputation through robust instrument watches, Pilot’s Watches, chronographs and complications, culminating in landmark achievements such as Kurt Klaus’s perpetual calendar.
The 1985 mechanism was revolutionary precisely because it concealed extraordinary complexity behind extraordinary ease of use.
The ProSet mechanism feels like the latest chapter of that same philosophy.
And Mercedes-Benz’s anniversary makes the metaphor unusually elegant. The automobile began with a patent in 1886; IWC began with an engineer’s audacious manufacturing experiment in 1868.
One transformed transportation. The other transformed the industrial possibilities of Swiss watchmaking.
Now, 140 years after Benz changed the meaning of mobility, IWC has created a mechanical tribute that asks a rather provocative question: what if progress in luxury is not about adding more, but about making the extraordinary feel effortless?
Limited to 140 pieces, the Big Pilot’s Watch Perpetual Calendar ProSet 140 Years Mercedes-Benz answers that question with considerable authority.
It is handsome. It is technically formidable. It is historically literate. But, more importantly, it is coherent.
It is a meeting of two engineering cultures — Schaffhausen precision and Stuttgart performance — distilled into something remarkably intimate.
A machine for measuring time, created in honour of a machine that changed the world.
And limited to 140 pieces, it is one machine that will not be waiting indefinitely.
IWC Schaffhauzen’s Big Pilot’s Watch Perpetual Calendar ProSet 140 Years Mercedes-Benz watch will be available in select IWC Schaffhausen boutiques worldwide. For more details, visit https://www.iwc.com today!
*Photos courtesy of IWC Schaffhausen.
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