Limited to 140 pieces, IWC’s latest Big Pilot pairs a commemorative Mercedes-Benz design with the brand’s innovative Perpetual Calendar ProSet
IWC Schaffhausen was hardly going to let Mercedes-Benz’s 140th anniversary pass without fanfare. After all, since the two brands first partnered in 2004, they’ve shared a seemingly inexhaustible appetite for ingenuity and innovation, a relationship that has since expanded from Mercedes-AMG to the Mercedes-AMG PETRONAS Formula One Team and beyond. And set against a year in which IWC has pursued that same spirit with more than a few headline-grabbing timepieces of its own, it was only natural that the manufacture would celebrate this shared ethos with something suitably accomplished.
The result is the Big Pilot’s Watch Perpetual Calendar ProSet 140 Years Mercedes-Benz, a 140-piece limited edition that marks the occasion with one of IWC’s most significant developments in perpetual-calendar watchmaking in decades.
This development is, of course, the Perpetual Calendar ProSet, a complication IWC first unveiled earlier this year at Watches and Wonders 2026. While the manufacture’s history with perpetual calendars stretches back to 1985 and Kurt Klaus’s seminal perpetual calendar, IWC’s new ProSet required reengineering from the ground up. Its entirely gear-based module, protected by four patents, allows the calendar to be moved both forwards and backwards from a single crown position, a first for an IWC perpetual calendar.
With no additional pushers to contend with, no switching between crown positions and, perhaps most usefully, no problem should you accidentally advance the calendar too far, the ProSet is the brand’s most intuitive perpetual calendar yet.
For this 140th-anniversary edition, this mechanical rigour is paired with a restrained take on the Big Pilot. The 42mm brushed and polished stainless-steel case frames a black dial punctuated by solid-gold appliqués and gold-plated hands. A crisp white minute track provides some contrast around the perimeter, while the black rubber strap keeps the overall composition contemporary.
Despite the amount of information on display, the dial retains the familiar symmetry of IWC’s perpetual calendars. The date occupies the subdial at 3 o’clock, the month sits at 6 and the day of the week at 9, while the Double Moon phase takes pride of place at 12 o’clock. The latter depicts the moon as seen from both the northern and southern hemispheres and, thanks to a newly calculated reduction gear, will deviate by just one day in 1,040 years. Completing the calendar is IWC’s characteristic four-digit year display, tucked between 7 and 8 o’clock.
Powering the timepiece is the in-house calibre 82665, an automatic movement equipped with the brand’s bidirectional Pellaton winding system and offering a 60-hour power reserve. Turning the watch over reveals a sapphire-glass caseback bearing the historic emblem introduced following the 1926 merger of Daimler Motoren-Gesellschaft and Benz & Cie., which combined Benz’s laurel wreath with DMG’s three-pointed star. A fitting nod to the carmaker’s anniversary, the Big Pilot’s Watch Perpetual Calendar ProSet 140 Years Mercedes-Benz is limited to 140 pieces worldwide.
