In memoriam John R. de Vries

[brinkie]

I have the sad duty to inform you that John de Vries, designer of the Volvo 480 and a great fan of the car, passed away last night. I will miss his joy and stories at Volvo 480 meetings.

More details about the funeral service and an address to send your condolences to will follow.

[jamescarruthers]

Oh no, this is awful news. Thank you for sharing Robert. What a wonderful man: great car and a gentleman. ‎

[Jay-Kay-Em]

That’s really sad news. My deepest condolences.

Was hoping to meet the man in 2026.

RIP to the guy that created a car design that has kept me enthralled for 30 or more years.

What an amazing legacy to design a car that some 40 years later you get a passionate group of enthusiasts still getting enjoyment as opposed to designing say a kettle, or a chair, or a cutlery set.

May the cars live on.

[WillC9303]

This is very sad news. I was also hoping to meet him at a meet some time.
R.I.P to a great automotive designer

[Martin63]

I have the sad duty to inform you that John de Vries, designer of the Volvo 480 and a great fan of the car, passed away last night. I will miss his joy and stories at Volvo 480 meetings.

More details about the funeral service and an address to send your condolences to will follow.

That's really sad news Robert - I am just so glad that John was able to join us in Eindhoven in May 2024. You could see how very proud he was to see nearly 100 480s gathered together from all around Europe nearly 30 years after car production ceased. He was a truly great designer.

[Midu480]

What a sad new, the father of our beloved car passed away.

We had the pleasure to invite and meet him some years ago during a meeting of Forum 480, the French organization.
What a gentleman when he described the story of the car.

Sincères condoléances from all members of Forum 480.
We will keep the treasure alive.

Michel Ducuroir

[dragonflyjewels]

This news is really quite devastating. I thought John looked very unwell by the end of the meeting last year, but followed it with an email to him and Janny just to say how nice it was to see them both again. I also mentioned that we had called in at the DAF museum in Eindhoven on our way home, and wondered which of the exhibits John had designed. I received a reply from John saying that he wished he had known as he would have liked to give us a guided tour and take us home for coffee afterwards. We will be visiting my daughter in Germany after the French club meeting in September, so I suggested to John that we meet up at the DAF museum on the way back from there if he was well enough. The reply came from Jannny (as it often does) and she was quite optimistic that September would be possible for John. What a blow to discover that that we will not see him again, he was such a lovely man.

We have known John since the 2016 30th anniversary meet in Limburg, Germany. We've had long conversations with him as his English was very good and also kept in touch by email so we learnt a lot about the history of the 480. We had arranged that he and Janny would have a holiday in England and come to one of our mini meets. The plan was for him to give the same talk we'd heard at one of the French club meets and John also suggested that we visit the wind tunnel in Coventry where the 480 was tested. Sadly illness intervened, although he remained optimistic that it would happen one day.

I will do a write up of everything I learnt from him and post it on here.

It was a priviledge to know him and I greatly valued our friendship. It must have been so hard for both of them to suffer such a long period of ilness. As soon as John was on the mend from on thing, something else came along. So tragic.

[Midu480]

We could all send a note to his wife and family: john@jannydevries.nl with memories from the beautiful meetings.
The ceremony will take place on Saturday 28 June at 14H. In the Aula, Crematorium Heezervenne DELA, Somerenseweg 120, Heeze, Netherland.
See you there friends, a last good bye to the father of our beloved car.
MD

[jamescarruthers]

Here is John at the big meeting in Europe last year. Picture taken by my father

[dragonflyjewels]

After a whatsapp message from Brinkie on 21st June to tell us John had died. I received the following email from Janny with the funeral details :

“I herewith wish to inform you that on Saturday the 21st of June my husband, our father and our grandfather John R. de Vries, with a gentle pinch in my hand, passed away in his sleep.

Saddened, but also relieved, especially for him, we are coping with this loss.”


The notice of the funeral details was in Dutch but had this quote from A.A.Milne:

“How lucky am I to have something that makes saying goodbye so hard.”


We were told that the family would appreciate as many 480s as possible at the funeral so on Friday we sadly left for an overnight stay in Dunkirk.

Here is Paris waiting to board the ferry in Dover, with 59920 miles on the odometer.



Somewhere in Belgium the following morning she hit 60k but it passed unmarked as I was doing 130kph plus to make sure we arrived in Eindhoven in good time. Even though we were very early, we went to the crematorium first just to make sure we knew exactly where it was, then returned to the small town in search of coffee. I’d just pulled into a parking place when a red 480 pulled up alongside. The driver told us the Dutch club were meeting up to drive in procession to the crematorium so we followed him. Waiting at the meeting place we found a row of 480s, with Brinkie, Chris Unger, Thijs and our old friend Arnold amongst the owners. There were 12 of us in the procession.

It worried me that there was no sign in the carpark of our Belgian friends, Michel (midu480) and Jacqueline as I knew they were going. As it turned out they had arrived at the same time as the hearse and Janny had asked them to park their car right in front of the crematorium door so that the many friends and family could see his design. There must have been about 100 people there.

The ceremony was quite beautiful, even though it was all in Dutch. We understood them speaking of the Volvo 480 and John’s award winning designs at DAF. His DAF95 was named the "International Truck of the Year" in 1988. This award is the industry's highest honour for trucks according to DAF Trucks N.V. There was a big screen where numerous photos of John through the years were displayed, with background music by favourites of ours such as Clannad, Enya and Simon & Garfunkel. Whoever put the service together did a wonderful job and made it a celebration of his life.

Afterwards we were all invited to go to the coffin at the front to silently make our personal farewells. Then we went through to a big seating area for coffee and cakes and the opportunity to speak to the family.



I was surprised not to see Rob Koch or Corien Pompe there. Hopefully Rob is in good health, he must be in this 80s now. Perhaps Corien is still working for Volvo in Sweden. I expect they will both be at the International meet next year.

Our return journey was uneventful but very tiring – we finally got home at 1.30am. I was pleasantly surprised at how lively Paris is now that she has had several blasts on the continent. Having had a second owner for 28 years who never went very far in her, she must have needed her engine cleaned out. Her third owner has been happy to oblige !

[jamescarruthers]

I did wonder if you guys would go. Very pleased to hear you did.

[dragonflyjewels]

James, you probably remember letting me know when a ladie's 480 promotional scarf popped up on ebay - I wore it to the funeral. Al has since acquired a 480 tie so he wore that. Made a nice tribute to John.

[dragonflyjewels]

Here is the promised write up of my notes from the talk John gave to the French club

The design brief for a new car was contained in what was known as the Red Book, which would be issued to various designers for them to work from to submit a design. When Volvo issued the red book for what came to be the 480, it was sent to the design departments at both of their Swedish factories as well as the Born factory in the Netherlands, and also to two independent Italian designers, Coggiola and Bertone. When it arrived at Born, Robert Koch asked John de Vries to do a design, but John was still working on the 3 series and told his boss he didn’t have time.
Robert Koch pointed out that it was a very interesting project, so eventually, John took the red book home with him to study in the evenings. He felt that what Volvo was trying to achieve was not totally reflected in their stipulations, so he noted the amendments he felt necessary and became sufficiently interested to start work on a design in his own time.
Because he was working from home, John was not able to produce the large drawings required, but decided he would submit his ideas anyway, together with his notes on the changes to the red book. He expected nothing much to come of it. Once all the designs arrived at Volvo’s Head Office, they were put on display in a large exhibition area for everyone to study and submit their comments – John was totally surprised to find that his drawings were exhibited alongside the much larger ones from the other designers, and even more surprised when Volvo revised their red book in line with his suggestions. As we all know, it was his design which Volvo eventually decided on.
John very modestly suggested it might have just been a political choice to pick the Dutch design given that the car was to be built in the Dutch factory. Personally, I don’t think a car manufacturer investing huge sums of money in a new model would select anything other than what they considered the best design.
Most of the design work was done on clay models. The world’s best clay modellers are British, trained in the Staffordshire potteries. It takes time to assemble a team for a major project as the ones chosen could be working on other projects anywhere in the world, so Volvo had to wait 2 months for one to be available from a project in America and 5 months for another to finish work in Australia etc. Eventually John had a full team based in Coventry, where they spent the next 3 years refining and perfecting the design. The pop up headlights were incorporated to meet legal requirements in both the USA and UK, governing the minimum height for headlamps, without compromising the shape of the streamlined bonnet. The triangular panels containing the door locks were partly so that owners would not scratch the paint trying to put keys into a low lock in the normal position on a door and partly to allow for the shaped of the glass and angle of lift.
Once complete, the interior of the full sized model was cut away, and it was sprayed with many coats of paint to give a perfect shine. The finished thing was difficult to distinguish from a real car. A team from Volvo Head Office inspected it thoroughly before the go ahead was given to proceed.
The next stage of the design process is to give the model to a team of engineers, who cut through it thin slice by thin slice, taking exact measurements of each slice in every direction, so that the engineering designers know exactly how much space they had to fit all the mechanical components into. Normally, the design of the interior would be done by the same team as the exterior, but after 3 years in Coventry John was more than ready to go home to his wife and young children. He left Volvo and went to work for DAF in a more senior design role.
When the car was launched at the Geneva Motor Show in 1986, John was absolutely horrified to see that his colour coded bumpers had been changed to black ones. He felt that they made the car look less streamlined and heavy at the bottom. He wanted the pinstripes on the rubbing strips for the same reason and of course they also needed to continue onto the bumpers. Eventually of course, Volvo changed to colour coded bumpers. I was pleased to see that James had the bumpers painted on his launch car – it makes a fitting homage to John.

[WillC9303]

Thanks for the write-up, Sylvia. Interesting to hear that unpainted bumpers were not what John intended in his original design. I wonder what Volvo was thinking there. Perhaps to accentuate the heavy impact absorbing nature of them? The cynic in me says it was probably down to accountants wanting to save a few guilders on paint. Still, if you specced one in black, you'd get them painted anyway! I do remember reading somewhere that despite the two-tones releasing in 1992, John had them in mind with his design as far back as his initial sketches.

John's favourite part about the design of his car was the metal panel below the taillights but above the rear bumper. Not sure why, so I'll have to rewatch the interview video from the 2024 meet.

[dragonflyjewels]

I seem to recall that the talk in 2024 referred to the rear lights when actually John meant the natural light making the paint look different shades.