The DAF 66 (Volvo) Is a Small Car with Quirky Engineering

The little Dutch company DAF made some brilliant and quirky cars before their sale to Volvo in 1975. This was the last car badged as a DAF, the 66, complete with De Dion tube rear suspension and Variomatic CVT.

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[TwinCam]

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[petertroth]

Way back l went to DAF in High Wykeham for a Variomatic training course.
One of the highlights being a burn down the road at 110mph in a DAF 66 Marathon.
Fantastic cars, reliable, good looking. Pity they ver caught on

[WyrdStar]

I don't normally watch car videos, but I used to own a Volvo 66 and couldn't resist! Brought back memories...

[tiagogomes]

I can see him working as a presenter for a tv car show.... Very professional and well put together presentation

[timothyokane]

The one amazing thing about the transmission is it can go just as fast in reverse, as it does going forward, that's the magic of a CVT.

[andrewhubbard]

The daf was a great little car the 33 and 44 were air cooled two cylinder engines, my old mum god bless her had all four models over the years lovely memories

[alanr]

I had a Volvo 343 in the 80s. It had the variomatic. I don't remember it having a 'P' on the selector. The selector beeped when moved, and it lit up.
One of it's quirks was, it could go the same speed in reverse as forward. Which I tried in an empty car park.
My uncle had the 66, in the early 70s but it was DAF badged. He needed automatics because of a false left leg and they weren't common in those days. He always said it was the best car he had ever driven.

[Grant]

Quite ironic, hill descent function on a Dutch car! 😝😂😂😂

[arlandaplanespotting]

My grandparents had a white Volvo 66 and I have so many memories from ride along in the back seat as a child.

[PieterKuijk]

I remember those. You don't see a lot of them around anymore, even not here in the Netherlands. Some of them were wrecked in a crazy car race that involved cars driving in reverse the whole course called achteruitracen. They were popular because the CVT allowed the cars to reach the same top speed in reverse as it would in forward gear

[stevensarson]

As a teenager I had a friend who drove a ‘Daffodil’ with its belt drive and rubber mats. He was the local vicars son and we would use it to get around the various youth clubs in our area. One of several interesting cars in the late 60s/early 70s. The ‘variomatic’ system sounded like something straight out of a Hotpoint of the same era.

[solentbum]

I owned a DAF 44 for several years, an 850 cc air-cooled boxer engine. Top speed just over 80mph, 45 mpg. It would tow my boat easily. Same body as the 66. Being one of the DAFs without a rear diff, it had two separate drive belts, one to each wheel, it was magic in snow. I had a tyre blowout on the motorway at 70 mph, the car was rock solid on the road and I was able to drive to the next interchange safely. In traffic it was a fraction slow for the first 20 yards then it left all its similar sized competitors standing. (BLMC Mini, etc) For my wife it was idea for putting our young son in, with a very early safety car seat in centre rear, plus the pushchair in the boot.
In the UK DAFs suffered from the name of the earliest model which was called the 'Daffodil', later renamed the '33'. At one stage DAF produced the fastest automatic in the world, a full blown rally car.
In the video you forgot to mention that it goes as fast backwards as forwards!
I rate the 44 DAF as the second best car I have owned only surpassed by my current LEAF. (and I have owned somewhere around 40 different cars of varying types)

[stevenclarke]

In the 1970’s a lady in my road, had one of these, and we called it the washing machine car!

[captainswoop]

My dad used the engine brake button quite a bit. He was helping to restore a steam locomotive at Grosmont on the NYMR (he did his apprenticeship in the 50s in an engine shed) He was going three times a week down very steep hills in to the Esk Valley up from Whitby.
The DAF died on the way to work in Middlesbrough when one of the belts broke.

[harveyneedleman]

Great review. In the early 80s i had a granada 3.0 ghia which i crashed and it was on 3rd party insurance. While i saved up to have it repaired i drove a daf 66 coupe. It was great fun. Thanks for the trip down memory lane.

[Stars_Falling_]

You've done the legacy of DAF justice...by driving a Volvo. Job well done!

[davidfarrar]

My dad used to get one of these as a courtesy car when his Volvo was in for service at Olaf Olsen, Newmillerdam, Wakefield in the late 1970's.

[neoquest]

My old dear had a Daf 55 back in the 70s think it was a 1100, bright orange, I remember it being quick off the line, and tail happy in the wet, and one of the belts broke coming back from the south coast, we crawled home at 15mph!

[trevormattocks]

I had the estate version. When I bought it, the transmission needed a bit of work, a mate who is a mechanic fixed it, with parts from a local scrap car yard from a Daff 66. I had a radio in mine, but you couldn't really hear it, because the car was quite noisy with the transmission. Made the mistake of going on a long trip. Ended up feeling really nauseated with a terrible headache! Ended up installing some sound deadening material which helped a bit. Great around town on short trips though. That button I knew as the low ratio hold for the hills. All in all I found the 66 quite a querky little car. Thanks for a great video on this car.

[eeedelli]

Well that certainly brought back some memories! As a family, we had DAFs from about 1970 to about 1990, starting with a 46, then a 55 estate, a 66 saloon and finally a Volvo 66GL estate.

One of the reasons you don’t see many preserved is because they just used to disintegrate! Rust control wasn’t what it is today but they were fantastic little cars while they lasted. Since you didn’t have to take the power off to change gear, they could easily out-accelerate a BMW … up to about 30mph … when the cones started to swap over to high ratio. (Above that, acceleration was ‘basic’.) I was never a ‘boy racer’ but there were one or two occasions when I remember seeing astonishment on the face of other drivers who all too often associated them (incorrectly) with ‘little old ladies driving to church at 15mph’. That was because the 2-stroke DAF 33s tended to be used for that. The Renault engines gave them ‘pocket rocket’ performance though, strangely, the performance of the DAF 55 & 66 (1100) seemed far better than the Volvo 66 (1300). I never could work out why.

One thing that did let them down a bit (apart from the rust!) was the vacuum diaphragm in the primary units of the transmission. They always seemed to tear and spring a leak relatively quickly (within a couple of years of being fitted) and, as there were two primary units, it always seemed to be in the garage getting one or the other replaced - and it wasn’t a small job, as I recall. Also, as they were so unlike anything else on the road, mechanics (other than DAF-trained ones) were largely clueless, never having had to deal with switchable vacuum valves, diaphragms and variable cone adjustments to deal with in transmissions, so tended to steer clear of them or ask stupid amounts of money to make you go and find some other mug to get the work done! (Luckily for us, there was a former DAF service station only a couple of miles away which kept looking after ours for years after DAF had been taken over by Volvo.)

If you’d been standing where you were in this video about 30 -40 years ago (a clever trick, in your case!), you might well have seen one of our DAFs in that very car park, as we often used to head along the M57 and East Lancs for a trip out to Makro for the business.