In 1958 DAF showed a small car with no gears to change: just rubber belts and pulleys. In theory it went as fast backwards as forwards. The Dutch, naturally, raced them in reverse.
Part 1
The great idea
The Variomatic was Hub van Doorne’s invention. He founded DAF with his brother Wim: Hub was the inventor, and Wim had the head for business.
Instead of a gearbox, the car drove through two rubber belts running over pulleys that changed size as you went. Three things set the ratio: engine speed, the pull in the belts and suction from the engine. There were only two pedals, accelerator and brake.
DAF showed its first car, the 600, at the Amsterdam motor show in February 1958, and by the end of that show it had 4,000 orders.
Part 2
What actually happened
Production began in 1959, and more than 800,000 DAFs with the Variomatic took to the road; the exact total depends on whose count you use.
It worked, too. The belts stretched with use, but a warning light told you, and an adjuster under the rear bumper took up the slack. With no separate reverse gear, a DAF could in theory go as fast backwards as forwards, so the Dutch raced them backwards, first at Zandvoort.
It found odd jobs too, from a mail van for the Swedish post office to motor sleighs for Norway, France and Italy.
Part 3
Where it went wrong
The biggest problem was image, not engineering. Most drivers who had learned to change gear found the automatic childish, and DAF never shook off its image as a car for the elderly and for women. Even Queen Juliana used one in her spare time.
Rubber had its limits. In 1966 Commercial Motor doubted belts could serve cars of over 50 hp unless most of the torque went through gears. At launch DAF had claimed the belts were tested to at least 80,000 km; by 1966 it said the average car ran over 20,000 miles before they needed replacing.
And DAF was small. It had been advised to separate its cars from its lorries, and Volvo, wanting a smaller model, bought a third of the car division in 1972 and 75 per cent on 1 January 1975.
Part 4
What changed
DAF’s car division became Volvo Car BV. Volvo renamed the Variomatic “CVT” and built belt-driven cars until 1991; the very last 340 had one as a nod to its DAF roots.
The belt idea outlived the cars. Ford, Fiat and Van Doorne spent $120 million on a steel-belt CVT from 1976, and by 1995 Ford, Fiat and Subaru were using the Van Doorne CVT. Van Doorne’s Transmissie, bought by Bosch in 1995, reached 100 million pushbelts in 2024, the year Aftersales Magazine estimated that one in four automatic transmissions worldwide is a CVT.
The department’s view: being called childish by people who enjoy changing gear is not the same as being wrong.
Part 5
The Useless Verdict
A car that, in theory, goes at the same speed backwards as forwards. I also go at the same speed in both directions. It’s just that the speed is zero.
— Useless, acting head of the Oops Department
Part 6 · The serious article
The serious version lives at daf-variomatic.motoring.im
This file is a short companion. The full, sourced history, with pictures, diagrams and every reference, is on its factual home:
Useless
