Sir James Dyson on what cars really need

“The dashboard is a jumble of switches and buttons,” he says. “Everything looks the same and there seems to be no particular order. Yes, you would eventually learn your way around, but it should be more instinctive.” Perhaps by following JCB’s example of using brighter colours for important controls or the aviation industry’s use of colour-coding? “Yes, exactly. The heater controls could be colour-coded in, say, red. Everything to do with audio in another colour, and so on.”

It’s a foul day on our visit and Dyson starts peering at the windscreen wipers. “The trouble with wipers is that they brush the muck back and forth across the screen. Eventually it causes scratches in the glass. 

“We’ve got a new hand drier called the Airblade. Air is blown through a very narrow slit and reaches around 400mph. It’s not heated, just very high velocity. Now, this idea could be transferred onto the car. Instead of a strip of rubber — which needs to be regularly replaced — wiping the screen, you’d have an invisible jet of air moving across it.”

I can see even more practical crossovers from the world of vacuum cleaners to cars. In among the toys on the table in Dyson’s office are a couple of electric motors. “Pick them up,” says Dyson. “The heavy one is an older one. The new one is half the weight and considerably more powerful. We’re constantly looking at making more efficient motors that reduce overall weight and energy consumption.”

Electric cars are on their way, there’s no doubt. It’s long been suggested that Dyson should have a crack at building one. That may never happen, but for sure much of the work that goes on in Dyson’s development centre could have applications in motoring.

Trevor Baylis

Baylis is everyone’s idea of an inventor. He lives on an island, has a lathe in his house and smokes a pipe. He’s famous, of course, for his wind-up radio. But there’s more to the man than a smell of tobacco and an eccentric house. Baylis is passionate about inventing and has set up a company called Trevor Baylis Brands, which gives advice to up-and-coming inventors and holds their hand through the rocky world of obtaining patents. 

Baylis walks out to our Vauxhall Insignia clutching his latest invention: a telescopic aluminium walking stick that incorporates an LED light (powered, naturally, by clockwork). It’s a very simple idea; in common with most inventors, Baylis adores simplicity. 

“It’s a good-looking car,” he says, clambering aboard. But right away he’s pointing at the audio control buttons on the centre of the fascia. “The numbers are too small on those buttons. It wouldn’t cost any money at all to make them bigger so that you can read them.” Like Dyson, Baylis is critical of the modern car’s plethora of controls, none of which “falls easily to hand” (as motoring journalists used to write in the 1970s). 

Baylis likes machinery, so we’re soon under the bonnet. “Where’s the battery? And where’s the washer bottle?” To be fair to Vauxhall, they are labelled, but Baylis would have them made foolproof. His other criticism is the difficulty of reading the oil level from the dipstick. “It’s impossible to see where the level is or where it should be. A morning in the workshop with a mug full of oil and a few lengths of metal would sort this one out.”

Baylis has a fervour for invention and for the right of the inventor (along with GB plc) to be rewarded for his intellectual property. He would also like invention to be part of the national curriculum — and why not?

Michael Cotton

Fans of the TV programme Dragons’ Den may be familiar with Michael Cotton. He and his partners came up with a blissfully simple device to prevent drivers from putting the wrong fuel in their cars, and were rewarded when two of the entrepreneurs opened their wallets. 

After a quick demonstration of his invention in the Insignia’s fuel filler, Cotton sets about the car with a mind to come up with something as simple and useful as his Fuel Angel misfuelling device. Like Dyson and Baylis, Cotton immediately latches on to the complexity of modern cars’ control systems.