Citizen Eco-Drive 365 Limited Edition
Drive to Survive: A Closer Look At The Citizen Eco-Drive 365
The brand’s new light-powered movement promises 365 days of running time.
By Rhonda Riche
Editor-At-Large
Addressing the world’s many environmental emergencies can seem overwhelming, but sometimes the most effective action comes with small incremental changes. One of Citizen’s goals has been to provide the world with environmentally friendly watches that do not need regular battery replacement.
The Japanese brand introduced the world’s first light-powered analog watch in 1976 and has been evolving this technology ever since.
This year, Citizen has developed a new Caliber E365 Eco-Drive movement that features a running time of 365 days on just one full charge. And now the brand is also celebrating its history of environmentally-friendly initiatives with three new, 1970s-inspired models that are all outfitted with this new mechanism.
All three models, including a limited-edition model, will be released in Fall/Winter 2023 as part of Citizen’s Global Collection.
Global Citizen
There’s a wide range of opinions on climate change, but we can all agree that it doesn’t hurt anybody to try and come up with cleaner sources of energy. One of the ongoing goals of Citizen Watch is to provide good times to people all around the world. Its corporate philosophy is: “Loved by citizens, working for citizens.”
Back in the early 1970s, the world was in the midst of an energy crisis, so the engineers at Citizen began looking into using sunlight as a clean energy source. This was the genesis of the brand’s revolutionary Eco-Drive – the world’s first light-powered analog watch. Since then, Citizen has continued to tinker with its light-powered watch technologies, evolving them to the point where even small amounts of artificial light can be converted into electricity to power its mechanisms.
But the sun is still the center of Team Citizen’s core values. According to the press release for these new Caliber E365 Eco-Drive watches, “the light of the sun shines down equally on everyone, no matter where we are in the world.”
Solar System
How has the Caliber E365 movement improved on an already awesome mechanism? By lowering power consumption and increasing running times. Like the time it takes the earth to circle the sun, the Caliber E365 runs for 365 days on a full charge.
The architecture of the movement maintains its standard 27mm diameter, but the components have been refined so that it runs more efficiently. Even pulses that move the hands have been tweaked to allow for less power waste. These refinements also allow for new design possibilities.
In the case of these new Eco-Drives, the design of the watches is inspired by a quartz model with an eye-catching original design launched by Citizen in 1973. But each iteration takes a different aesthetic approach.
There’s the all-black BN1015-52E, the streamlined, stainless-steel BN1014-55E, and the limited to-1,200-pieces BN1010-05E with lab-grown ruby red indices and a leather strap that recalls the distinctive look of the CITIZEN Quartz EFA, released in 1973. The leather strap is produced by a Leather Working Group-certified tanner.
More than Nostalgia
But the look is more than nostalgia for the good old days. The lines of these watches took into full consideration five decades of Citizen’s stainless-steel processing and polishing know-how.
The stainless-steel case of this collection also emphasizes rationality by combining clean, straight lines and flat surfaces with ridgelines at 12 and 6 o’clock that integrate smoothly with the lines of the bracelet. The case is faceted on each side to provide the kind of premium detail usually found in much more expensive watches.
The dial, used to generate power for the watch, has also been updated, using new-school manufacturing techniques to create a sparkling dial that still allows light to permeate the disc to generate power. Four types of glitter in different colors and sizes were combined to create an effect that suggests a night sky filled with stars. Applied metal indices located on the flange rather than the dial add an extra sense of depth.
The Citizen Eco-Drive 365 is one small step for man, but these watches also serve as a daily reminder that there are ways we can make the world a more beautiful place.
The Citizen Eco-Drive 365 lists for $550 for the black model (BN1015-52E), $495 for the stainless-steel model (BN1014-55E), and $895 for the limited edition (BN1010-05E).
For more information, please visit the Citizen website.
(Images © Citizen)
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