This Wild Automatic Watch Is Inspired by 1970s NASA Tech That Never Was

Driver’s Watches were such a small, short-lived trend that the concept looks like 1970s retro-futurist tech to a modern audience.

Swiss indie watch brand Amida took this idea and ran, or, should I say, blasted off with it. With a little revamp, the brand’s disco-era automatic driver’s watch now looks like a piece of NASA tech that never existed.

Amida

Driver’s watches were a purpose-built genre featuring digital dials angled perpendicularly to the wrist to optimize visibility while driving. They emerged at the dawn of the quartz age in the 1970s but were quickly made obsolete by digital car clocks.

Amida was revived in 2024 by industry veterans Clément Meynier and Matthieu Allègre, specifically to bring back the Digitrend. Originally released in 1976, the watch was a doomed novelty that tried to compete with cheaper quartz designs by using an automatic movement, a jump hour complication and a prism.

The Digitrend wasn’t around for long, but decades later, it became a fascination among collectors, and, coinciding with the reemergence of jump-hour watches, it appears that Amida’s time has finally come.

Amida

Hoping to avoid the same fate as the brand’s original incarnation, Meynier and Allègre are elaborating on the uses of the Digitrend concept.

Using a license for the NASA logo, which anyone can get for free by simply writing the space agency a letter requesting it, the unusual analog-digital watch looks out of this world.

Ready for takeoff

The inner workings of the Digitrend, featuring a jumping hour and a dragging minutes aperture viewed perpendicularly to the wrist through a prism, are unchanged. Beneath the top of the case, the time is actually displayed on two flat discs within a module, much like a standard watch.

Amida

It is the case’s retro-futuristic design that comes into play here. The smoothed brushed metal is replaced with black DLC steel topped with a white ceramic lid.

The black DLC steel monoblock case is fluted, while the ceramic top is perfectly smooth and glossy, marked only with the red NASA “worm logo” used from 1975 to 1992.

Amida

It comes on a matching strap made of black leather with a quilted nylon center. It is secured with a hook-and-loop pass-through black DLC steel buckle.

Making the jump

It’s easy to forget that the Digittrend NASA Tribute is a mechanical watch until you flip it over and see the sapphire crystal exhibition caseback.

It displays a Soprod Newton P092 automatic movement finished with Geneva stripes on the bridge and radial brushing on the rotor.

Amida

The movement is equipped with a 9-piece jumping-hour module developed by Amida and offers a 44-hour power reserve. It sits under a polished black DLC steel caseback secured by four screws.

Availability and pricing

Watches rarely have a box worth mentioning, but the Digitrend NASA Tribute comes in a bubble display case, pictured above, that looks like a prop from 2001: A Space Odyssey.

The Amida Digitrend NASA Tribute is available now from Amida for $4,420 and is a limited edition of 100 pieces. It is priced like a novelty aimed at hard-core collectors because that’s exactly what it is, but that doesn’t change the fact that it looks really cool.

Amida

Amida Digitrend NASA Tribute

Specs

Case Size	40m
Movement	Soprod Caliber P092 automatic
Water Resistance	50m

• $4,420 at Amida

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