toma@tekchips.UUCP (Tom Almy) (02/06/84)
Well, my family had a 1963 DAF way back when, made by the company that
holds the patents. Indeed it did have the smoothness of Buick's old
Dynaflow. The engine was 2 cylinders, 30 hp, up front, and the transmission,
one per rear wheel, was in the back. The two transmissions provided
differential action, and also acted line "limited slip". Performance on
snow and ice was just as good as a Beetle. There were problems, which
have probably been solved by now:
1). Belt slippage in high torque situations (such as starting on steep hills)
caused embarrassing squeel and no forward motion). Belt tension had
to be adjusted regularly (every couple thousand miles or so) to keep
it ok.
2). Belts lasted about 15k miles. While when one belt broke you could drive
on the other, problem (1) would become very severe.
3). Poor engine braking -- the high manifold vacuum on deceleration would
cause the belt to shift to the lowest ratio. There was a knob on the
dash to cause it to go to the highest (i.e. lowest "gear") but you
couldn't pull it out above about 30 mph.
4). The car had a 3 position gear shift -- Forward Neutral Reverse.
The gears had no synchronizers. You had to move the lever quickly
between F and R with the car standing still. If you got stuck in
Neutral, you had to turn the engine off, wait for the drive shaft to
stop spinning (several seconds), put it in gear, and restart. Yes,
you always had to start the car IN GEAR!
5). Considering the car had a presumably low loss transmission, little weight
(less than Beetle), and a small engine (Beetles had 40 HP at the time), it
got less mileage than a Beetle did (30 was the best we did). Its low
~60 mph top speed and poor acceleration made it the slowest thing on the
road as well.
I'll stick with a manual transmission!
Tom Almy (tektronix!toma)