   Dyson DC61 Animal in operation, front footwell before & after. Click image to enlarge |
Review and photos by Jonathan Yarkony
Every week when returning a vehicle to the manufacturer’s offices from which we’ve borrowed it, we are required to fuel and wash, inside and out, the vehicle in question. So every trip across town is punctuated by a stop at a gas station, a run through a car wash, and a visit to the two-dollar vacuum machine, where we wrestle with the $2 python known as the vacuum hose, slinging it between and under seats, with a single attachment that is always too big for tight spaces or missing entirely.
Well, for two months now we at Autos.ca were handed a reprieve from gas-station car-wash vacs by the kind folk at Dyson. You know Dyson, the vacuum cleaner brand with the Swedish guy taking about suction. Wait, what, he’s not Swedish? He’s British? Whatever. But still, those vacuums revolutionized the vacuum industry, starting with the bagless canister vacs that sold for a gazillion dollars, and looked like something that would be crawling the Jefferies Tubes in the Enterprise, ensuring a clean-room environment for all the pulsing, flashing futuristic cabling and ductwork. Pretty soon everyone was rushing to follow the bagless canister trend, and Dyson looked to get into different vacuum segments.
In addition to household canister and upright vacs, Dyson is now in the cordless handheld arena, with models like this DC61 Animal or DC72 and DC62 digital slim. What separates Dyson from the rest of the vacuum crowd is their powerful motors. They are the vacuum equivalent to a Hemi in a compact car.
For this particular model, the motor is Dyson digital motor V6 (that’s right, this vacuum has a V6!), which Dyson claims is three times faster than other brands’ handheld motors, and supplies 50 percent more power than the previous model. Here is some technical jibber jabber for those of you with electrical engineering degrees: “This power-dense motor uses digital pulse technology and a neodymium magnet to spin at up to 110,000 times a minute… The Dyson digital motor V6 inside the DC61 has a four-pole magnet, and supplies 50 percent more power than its predecessor V2.”
As with Dyson’s corded machines, the DC61 uses cyclone technology, this design dubbed “2 Tier Radial cyclones” because of its, well, two-tier parallel set up, like the double-decker couch of vacuum suction technology, only it’s really awesome.
Post road trip clean up, putting my daughter and our @Autos_ca handheld @dyson vac to work. #a3roadtrip pic.twitter.com/4ikforuwCg
— Jonathan Yarkony (@JYarkony) August 14, 2014
