A Closer Look at IWC Schaffhausen Big Pilot’s Watch Perpetual Calendar ProSet 140 Year Mercedes-Benz Limited Edition

I walked into Lucerne’s IWC Boutique the other day, and the team was hard at work setting the perpetual calendar of an out-of-town collector. When a perpetual calendar stops running because, for example, your watch winder died, resetting it can be complicated enough that you might simply take it to your boutique. Which brings us rather neatly to IWC’s new watch. The Big Pilot’s Watch Perpetual Calendar ProSet 140 Years Mercedes-Benz Limited Edition makes that process much easier.

That’s a mouthful, and there are several places to start when we want to talk about the new piece. What I’m going to choose to start with is what Kurt Klaus did almost 40 years ago and how they improved on it, the same way he would, just this year.

Mr. Klaus is a wonderfully friendly watchmaker who created the groundbreaking system of IWC perpetual calendars almost 40 years ago. What he did at the time was build the hugely complicated perpetual calendar system, but in a way that made it much more usable for the collectors who would buy it. Something to note with such complications is that they don’t always choose to show all the data and indications on the dial side. Mr. Klaus chose to have it all indicated.

Perpetual calendars keep track of time and date for years, including adjustments for leap years. To do this, they often had external correctors and pushers that would adjust things and often needed dedicated tools. What Mr. Klaus did was build a perpetual calendar that showed day, date, month, four-digit year, and a moon phase in addition to time, but with no additional correctors and no pushers. It is considered one of the most celebrated complications in modern watchmaking history. And this architecture became the backbone of IWC’s entire perpetual calendar lineage for the next 40 years and onward.

What IWC added this year is what they call the Perpetual Calendar ProSet. What this does is make things a little easier to adjust for the owner. The ProSet system allows you to adjust everything forward or backward from a single crown position. This isn’t something of particular interest with less complicated calendars, but with a perpetual, if you overshoot a date, you would need to cycle all the way forward again. So being able to reverse this with this new ProSet system makes things much more usable.

This new system was presented to the world in Geneva at Watches and Wonders 2026, but this limited edition was just released. It is a celebration of the partnership between Mercedes-Benz and IWC Schaffhausen that has also been going on for over 20 years. IWC has been the official partner of Mercedes-AMG since 2004 and the Official Engineering Partner of the Mercedes-AMG PETRONAS Formula 1 Team, the official works team of Mercedes-Benz, since 2013. Since Mercedes-Benz itself is celebrating 140 years, the two brand behemoths chose to honor this with a special run of watches limited to only 140 pieces, or one for every year.

The watch is part of the Big Pilot’s line and sits in a 42-millimeter brushed and polished stainless steel case. It has a black dial with solid gold appliqués and gold-plated hands. The visual look is very sharp, with modern lines and texture. Very readable and very clean, especially given the level of complication and the data to be shown. It is on the caseback that things are most special in terms of the partnership. IWC put the very first Mercedes-Benz logo on the sapphire crystal, the logo first introduced in 1926 that combined the laurel wreath from Benz’s emblem with Daimler’s three-pointed star.

One of the details we have always liked about IWC’s moon phases is the double moon display. It brings a nice level of balance and elegance to the very technical dial. Besides being enchanting, it is technically correct. The two moons are displayed in connection with the perpetual calendar system but also have their own different schedule, which means additional gearing and complication. The display will be accurate for both hemispheres, and because of the use of a recalculated reduction gear, it will be off by only a day after 1,040 years. To put this in context, that’s double the accuracy of the original Kurt Klaus moon phase.

So what we have here is a celebration of the 140 years of Mercedes-Benz as interpreted by its long-standing watchmaking partner. With the four subdials, it is very balanced, and with the one crown, the look is very clean. But behind all that is a celebration not only of the movement created by Mr. Klaus, but also of the vision he brought forward for always improving things for those who are able to wear the watch every day. Or, in this case, when they miss a few days and have to reset it.

This article originally appeared in Robb Report Philippines’ Watches and Jewelry Issue.