Tag Heuer's 60th Anniversary Autavia Packs New Tech Into a Truly Classic Design
Welcome to Dialed In, Esquire's weekly column bringing you horological happenings and the most essential news from the watch world since March 2020. This week marks the official beginning of a new year in watchmaking with LVMH’s Geneva Watch Week. It’s happening online, which means we can bring to you direct the brand-new launches, unveiled a few hours ago, from some of the luxury group’s storied Swiss brands.
The Autavia is a name that was in use at legendary watch brand Tag Heuer as early as 1933, when it was conceived for dashboard clocks for the blossoming sports of private aviation and motor-racing. It was only in 1962, however, that the name began top grace the dials of a new line of sporty wristwatches for an entirely new generation of petrol-heads.
Jack Heuer’s first new watch since he took the reins of the Heuer brand in 1958 was a hand-wound chronograph with a black dial and white sub-dials, a style known to watch nerds as a reverse panda. Technical, yet easy to read, it defined the accessible new mood of the early '60s and was quickly adopted as much as a style statement as a functional tool. It predated another famous Heuer, the Carrera, by a single year. For an indication of hipness, Mick Jagger owned one of each.
This week Heuer launches three new models of the Autavia in a 60th anniversary homage to the original with some serious upgrades under the hood. Two chronographs, one with an all black dial but with a blackened steel case, and another in steel with a steel dial and black sub dials—effectively a panda—feature a new in-house, COSC-certified Heuer Calibre 02 chronograph movement.
That would be innovation enough for many, but this movement also introduces a flyback function to the Autavia for the first time. The flyback is conceived to allow a user to restart the chronograph function instantaneously with the single press of a pusher without having to stop and restart it, allowing, for example, consecutive lap times to be recorded with ease. Both chronographs come with black alligator straps, with the DLC coated black version—for our money—being the most striking.
The third 60th anniversary Autavia is a major departure for the Autavia family. It features another in-house movement, the COSC-certified Heuer Caliber 07, and it’s a GMT watch, the first time that functionality has appears in the Autavia. Without the classic chronograph sub dials it looks markedly different from the other versions, with a simpler, open dial in blue that features a second time zone indicated by an orange pointer.
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