Review: Heritage & Horizons at the DAF museum

Designers love to work at scale. While working on a boundary-pushing concept is exciting, the fanfare sounds dies down as people look to the next bright, shiny thing. By contrast, the rewards that come with a successful mass-volume car endure far longer, crossing generations and passing into the annals of history. To use a literary metaphor, concepts are footnotes to the production car bodycopy. Giugiaro often namedrops the Fiat Panda as his favourite work ahead of the sinuous beauty of the Maserati Ghibli, which is likely why, when the chance came to redesign DAF's flagship truck, the Italian maestro jumped at the chance.

The designer’s legend was firmly established by 1981 when Aart van der Padt, the DAF CEO, asked him to draw up some designs for a new truck platform. DAF, after the success of its 2600 and 2800 models, was looking to take its next great leap forward. Who better than an Italian visionary to breathe life into a product grounded in Dutch pragmatism. 

In the end, the unlikely marriage did not quite pan out with DAF ultimately taking the project back in house to be finished off by John de Vries but Giugiaro's deft hand is evident in the final product. The result was the DAF 95 currently on show in a thought-provoking new exhibition at the DAF museum in Eindhoven. 

Heritage and Horizons is a two-pronged show, which aims to tell the design story of these big beasts while casting an eye of how the future might look through the lens of AI design tools. Curated by current DAF design director Bart van Lotringen, the exhibition kicks off with the Giugiaro story. The DAF 95 production model is accordingly given a prominent spot on the show floor – though in truth it would be nigh impossible for it not to be prominent given its pleasingly massive proportions. Giugiaro's work was a lesson in simplification, which became the blueprint to subsequent designs. 

Alongside sits the next iteration, Bertrand Janssen’s DAF 95XF and van Lotringen’s own sophisticated entry, which presents a more dynamic, but no less organised look with contemporary accoutrements like dainty-looking wing cameras. Placed next to each other, the evolution of the organising principles of the front face play out: from Giugiaro’s functional visage to Janssen’s more distinctive lower grille on the 95XF in 1998 – groundbreaking at the time as it moved away from a functional designed lower body into a more emotional one. 

And finally, van Lotringen’s more nuanced proposal. “In the 2010s I proposed to merge upper- and lower body into one flowing design with the DAF logo at eye-level, so that cabin and chassis are unified and that we disguise the necessary gap between suspended cab and fixed chassis,” the designer van Lotringen explains. “This coincided with the need for more cooling surface area as we are progressing then into more stringent Euro emission standards. The grille shape therefore becomes more powerful and visually striking.” 

Innovation underpins commercial vehicle design so high are the stakes and rewards for successful work. As so often is the case, experimental one-offs play a role in redefining what is possible. Commercial vehicles are no exception, which explains the presence of the 1985 entry into the Dakar Rally – a barely plausible janus-headed monster – the DAF 3300 4x4. It sits alongside a gem of an exhibit featuring Chris Milburn who designed the legendary DAF Paris-Dakar Bull –the follow up to the two-headed beast shown here. 

There are other unseen projects too. Following the takeover by US giant Paccar, the European design team put forward a streamliner style, cab rear concept with a sophisticated interior by Andy Woodman (who is now at Lego) to better understand the possibilities of the typology. 

The exhibition moves further into “what if” territory with a showcase of two young DAF designers work with AI who recreated the first  and a contemporary interpretation of the Johan van der Brugghen-designed DAF 600 passenger car from 1959. Equally fun is the AI-version of the DAF A30, which takes the 1949 original's distinctive grille and reworks it to incorporate the headlights into the lower mask. This was not without its challenges as the DAF archive gave the team little raw material to work with. 

“There were no design sketches to go on so we fed some line drawings to AI and trained it to make it resemble a sketch,” explains van Lotringen. Though the results make for an interesting design exercise, the limits of the technology are well-acknowledged by the design team.

“It’s still in its infancy. Sometimes the scaling is off, the wheels are not round. But the fact you can make a design and make a product out of it in one day after you’ve sketched it the other day shows the potential.” continues van Lotringen.

“In the first concept phase, designers want visual feedback. It interprets surfacing already quite well. On trucks sometimes scaling is 50% off and it comes out a bit stubby, so you run it a couple of times to get better results. It can be hit and miss.”

Early adopters of AI, like veteran designer Dan Darancou whose futurecasting experiments conclude the exhibition, can testify to the technology’s early misses. “When AI started to emerge, early versions were horrible hallucinations, wonky design, but it showed promise,” he says. That promise is illustrated handily by Darancou’s more whimsical experiments on display, which point to an imaginary future far beyond the current milieu. But there is practical stuff too. This is a truck company after all. 

What Darancou has in his locker as a designer is the ability to see the bigger picture. “The vision Bart and I crafted together was: the propulsion unit, autonomy or robotics or human intervention, still has to interact with the container. The container is king; how it gets moved and processed into delivering. Everything we wear, eat, our TVs, building materials, some poor guy brought it in a truck from some part of the world. Trucks are civilisation. We would perish as a species if we couldn’t move things from A to B.”

The Design with Artificial Intelligence – Heritage & Horizons exhibition runs from 1 November 2025 until 30 April 2026 and is open daily (except on Mondays and public holidays) from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.