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Top: e higher-specced XF models like this 2012 Waitoa Haulage XF105 8x4 have claimed around 10% of DAF’s NZ sales Lower left: e rst DAF, on the road in 1949
Lower right: Van Doorne’s entry into road transport was actually in building trailers, in 1932
injection technology and an optimised combustion chamber shape. And in 1988 DAF introduced its Space Cab concept, focused
on both operating costs and the driver, setting new standards, the company reckons, with the size of the cab and its comfort – targeted at Europe-wide operations.
The DAF 95XF was judged Europe’s Truck of the Year for 1988. And when it introduced the even bigger Super SpaceCab in 1994, that became “the benchmark when it comes to driver comfort and roominess,” DAF reckons.
In 1996, PACCAR bought the Dutch company. The Pacific Car and Foundry Company had by then been a key player in the North American heavy-duty truck market for over 50 years, following its 1945 acquisition of the Kenworth Motor Truck Company.
And, in 1958, it had expanded its US truck offering by purchasing the Peterbilt Motors Company. Then, in 1980, it had bought the British make, Foden.
Here in NZ, the news of PACCAR’s DAF acquisition delighted Southpac Trucks – a company created just two years earlier by current MD Maarten Durent, the late Mike Corliss and The Colonial Motor Company.
Recalls Durent: “We were on the next plane out” – Corliss and current CMC CEO Graeme Gibbons heading off to meet with PACCAR in a successful bid to add DAF to its NZ product portfolio.
“It just opened up a whole new avenue for us: We’d been North American drivetrain all the way through – even with the European cab on chassis, which was Foden.
“So it was really good to get into a continental European product – to look at how we could grow that European segment and take some market share. Not just off the Europeans, but the Japanese as well.”
It also, he explains, made the NZ operation much less vulnerable to volatile currency exchange rates.
In 1998 the 95XF became the European Truck of the Year – an honour the XF105 would repeat in 2007.
In 1999, the Transport 99 truck show at Hopuhopu, just outside Ngaruawahia, saw the official NZ launch of DAF, with an 85CF and 95XF sharing the Southpac stand with, among others, the new Kenworth T604 and the big-selling Foden Alpha.
Deliveries began the following year. The first official shipment of Kiwi DAFs saw just five trucks – 75CFs that went to Taranaki fleet J.D. Hickman and a Mainfreight owner/driver and three FAD 85CFs. One went to G.C. Stokes in Kumeu, one to Stephen Ward and the third...unknown. In 2000 41 DAFs were sold here.
Maarten Durent says that launching DAF in NZ “was hard going – as you’d expect.” It was a matter, he says, of convincing would-be customers of their reliability – and reassuring them with Southpac’s
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