Wednesday 9 July 2014

Car and Driver W620 - Red and Black

There seems to have been a but of interest in the Car and Driver (or C&D) watches, so I'm blogging another variant of a watch I blogged last year.

This watch is the digital model from the Car and Driver range, and uses a W620 module (although, as discussed previously, with a completely different LCD design than the Alba W620 watch I have). The watch has an inverse 2 line LCD with date and day (6 digits) across the top, and time (7 digits with the first used for an am/pm marker). Modes are stopwatch (with a lap memory of 8 and up to 10 hours, as well as a pace function), timer, and alarm. The module also has a low battery warning which will make the digits flash when the CR2025 battery is getting low.

The basis behind the watch is a little mysterious as they share a logo with the Car and Driver magazine (-the world's largest motoring magazine), but had an original sale price of ¥15,000, making them too expensive to just be a promotional giveaway. The watches also have no internet presence, but that seems to be common for late 90s Japanese warches). On the back of the tag, there is the following statement "CDM K.K. is the exclusibe (sic) licensee of the CAR AND DRIVER im and sold owner of the Car Device tm" along with a sketch of an old car. This may suggest that the watch was licensed by CDM K.K. and may have been part of a range of products called Car Device, but I can't find anything on this either.
Based on the model number and guarantee, the watches were made by Seiko, but their name doesn't appear anywhere on the case. This watch, like the others, was made in 1997 and so I'd assume that this (or 1998) was the release date.

The full model number is W620-4220, and the catalogue number was AVAW005.

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