H. Moser & Cie. is an independent Swiss manufacture that’s built its entire reputation on high-end mechanical watchmaking: hand-finished movements, in-house complications, and a design philosophy often built around stripping things away rather than adding them.
So the new Off-Grid release has come as a bit of a departure from that identity: it’s a quartz-powered, Bluetooth-capable digital watch, running on a connected movement platform Moser first built for Formula 1.
That platform is the Calibre D10, co-developed with Swiss tech firm Sequent, which debuted last year in the Streamliner Alpine Mechanic’s Edition, a $70,000 set built for Alpine’s F1 pit crew. That watch ran race countdowns and live team alerts over Bluetooth.
The new Off-Grid keeps the same underlying movement and hardware, including Bluetooth connectivity, but strips the functionality down to GMT with a country selector, a split-seconds chronograph, a perpetual calendar, a perpetual moonphase, sunrise and sunset times, an alarm, a timer, and a dedicated “Off-Grid” mode with a 10-word dictionary across 21 languages.
The 42.6mm steel case comes in two versions: blue PVD with a Blackor fumé dial, or black PVD with a Red fumé dial, both with an integrated rubber strap. It runs on a 12-month power reserve in time-only mode, and is limited to 1,000 pieces per colorway.
Moser is turning its F1 side project into an actual product
Most of what Moser built for the Alpine partnership was never going to reach a wider audience. A $70,000 connected watch limited to 200 sets, built specifically for a pit crew’s timing needs, is a proof of concept, not a product line. The Off-Grid is Moser taking that same technology and looking to make it (relatively) more accesssible.
Right now, that accessibility only goes so far. The initial run is capped at 1,000 pieces per colorway and starts with existing Moser clients before opening more widely on September 25.
But a release like this is usually a test case, not a one-off. If the Off-Grid sells through and the reception is good, there’s no reason the same connected platform couldn’t show up again at a lower price point, in a wider run, or as a permanent addition to the catalog, the same way plenty of brand experiments eventually trickle down into something a broader audience can actually buy.
Moser’s own materials lean hard on the idea that this isn’t trying to be a smartwatch: no push notifications, no fitness tracking, no data logging, just a curated set of travel and watchmaking-adjacent functions.
For an independent watchmaker that’s built its whole identity on removing rather than adding, whether it’s stripping indexes off a dial or refusing to let a chronograph look like a chronograph, applying that same philosophy to a connected watch is a logical next step.
Where to buy it
The H. Moser & Cie. Off-Grid is available now to existing Moser clients through h-moser.com and Moser boutiques, opening to the wider public on September 25 through October 4, priced at $4,900.
