Doctor Who: 10 Things Everyone Always Gets Wrong About The Daleks
9. The Dalek Time Machine Is Called A DARDIS
There's a long-standing belief that the time machine created by the Daleks and used in The Chase and The Daleks' Master Plan was called the DARDIS, a Dalek spin on the name of the Doctor's own time machine.
However, this simply is not true.
In Terry Nation's original scripts for The Chase, it was simply referred to as The Daleks' Time Machine. However, story editor Dennis Spooner changed this to DARDIS in his rewrites of Nation's script.
Director Richard Martin also adopted this shorthand for the camera script, to aid him in shooting the complicated prop. Crucially, the time machine was never referred to as the DARDIS onscreen, but that hasn't stopped fans adopting what was clearly a production shorthand on the part of Spooner and Martin.
The DARDIS was first mentioned in-universe in the Sixth Doctor novel The Quantum Archangel, where the Master is revealed to have stolen the core of the Daleks' DARDIS.
However, more generally, writers are happy with the assertion that the Daleks can travel through time in a nameless, specially-designed craft. After all, the Daleks don't need a fancy acronym like their arch-enemy does.