This Dutch Car Paved The Way For The CVT With A Variomatic Transmission

The Netherlands has a surprising way of inserting itself into the auto industry. That’s been true since the early 20th century. After all, it was a Dutch automaker — Spyker — that was first on the road with a six-cylinder car and all-wheel drive in 1903. Another landmark came with van Doorne’s Aanhangwagen Fabriek (DAF) 600, which went into production in 1959 as the first car with a continuously variable transmission (CVT).

Now, DAF called it a “Variomatic” transmission, but the principles are the same: the transmission uses a belt to connect the engine crankshaft with the drive shaft to get power from the motor to the wheels. The belt itself runs through a specialized pulley system that can change the diameters of the pulleys, and that effectively changes the ratios between the two shafts.

Physical gears do the same thing, but since you can’t change their size on the fly, you’re limited to, say, five available gear ratios in a five-speed transmission. A CVT can, in theory, create an infinite number of ratios by adjusting the pulley diameters in a practically unlimited range of increments. With the engine able to remain running at optimum rpm as the pulley diameters change, instead of having to adjust its own rpm to fit the needs of the gears, the result is a significant increase in fuel economy.

Hubert and Willem van Doorne founded what would later become DAF in 1928. By 1949, the company was making its own trucks. The van Doornes, however, had always wanted to build cars for the public. That dream finally came true in 1958, when the DAF 600 made its world premiere at the Amsterdam International Motor Show alongside rides like the Ford Thunderbird, the BMW 507 — one such roadster was once owned by Elvis — and the Zundapp Janus 250 micro-car. 

As for the DAF 600, it relied on a .59-liter two-cylinder engine making all of 22 bhp for a top speed of 65 mph — although drivers had to spend some time to get to that point, since just reaching 60 took up some 30 seconds. That said, the automatic operation of its transmission and impressive fuel economy helped the DAF 600 sell more than 30,000 examples during its four years on the market.

The Variomatic transmission was even more popular. Not only was it used in more than 815,000 DAF street cars through 1975, it also appeared in some Formula 3 racers and rally cars as DAF tried to build a sporting reputation in the mid-1960s. This did little for the automaker, but the early CVT came along with company when it was purchased by Volvo — eventually appearing in approximately 1.1 million Volvos as late as 1991.

The Variomatic transmission didn’t have a real impact on the auto industry until the debut of the 1989 Subaru Justy compact — which was basically a Kei car upsized to better meet the demands of the U.S. market. Now, those demands also included a growing interest in automatic transmissions, but the Justy didn’t offer one in Japan, and Subaru ruled out a traditional autobox because of performance concerns. So they licensed the Variomatic technology from Volvo, but updated it with electronic sensors to help manage the changing belt ratios and new belts themselves, going from rubber to steel.

The setup was called an electronic CVT (e-CVT), and the Justy was the first mass-produced car ever sold with the system. This set the stage for the transmission’s current popularity: About 22% of the cars sold in the U.S. now feature CVTs, including all Subaru models, though the sportier BRZ and WRX can still showcase manual transmissions.

However, you should keep in mind that today’s e-CVTs are different from traditional CVTs in that they don’t do the belt and pulley thing; instead, they’re typically found on hybrids, where they rely on planetary gears, computing power, and electric motors for their operation.