Dyson Car+Boat Review: Powerful spot cleaning everywhere

Introduction

The Dyson Car+Boat is a handheld vacuum cleaner designed for spot cleaning jobs, where you need a bit more power, such as in a car or, indeed, on a boat. To that end, this is a far bigger and more powerful unit than many rivals, although it’s not strictly a new vacuum cleaner.

Rather, this is a Dyson V8, repackaged in a box but without the floor head and wand. Does that matter? Not particularly, as this is a powerful and flexible handheld cleaner, although it is a bit niche.

Design and Features

• A repackaged V8 without the floor head
• Easy to use
• Good range of accessories

Dyson doesn’t try to hide the fact that the Dyson Car+Boat isn’t really a new vacuum cleaner: the box says Dyson V8 on it.

Here, you get just the handheld accessories (crevice tool, mini motorhead and combination tool), but not the wand or floor head.

That’s because this vacuum cleaner is designed as a handheld model for tackling spot cleans. It’s in the same vein as the Shark Premium Handheld Vacuum WV270UK. Just a bigger and even more powerful unit.

That’s evident with the bin size. With the Dyson Car+Boat you get a larger 0.54 litre bin; most handhelds have a fraction of this.

This bin has a clever ejection system, where the top filter and cyclones pull up, pushing dirt out of the flap at the bottom and into the bin.

You can also fully remove the bin if you need to clean it out.

There are then two filters (one in the top, one at the back), which can be removed and cleaned when the vacuum cleaner starts to cut in and out.

As a product that was designed as a full-on cordless vacuum cleaner, the Dyson Car+Boat has a larger battery than most handheld cleaners, too. This is built to tackle bigger-than-average cleaning jobs.

The battery can’t easily be removed, which is a shame. I’d have liked Dyson to use the clip-in battery system that its newer cleaners use, such as the Dyson Gen5detect.

There’s also no wall dock with this model, so it’s charged by physically plugging in the power adaptor into the port on the battery.

Also unchanged from the original is the power trigger. While Dyson has moved to a dedicated on/off button, the Dyson Car+Boat has the old-fashioned trigger, which has to be held in.

With the original V8, the trigger was a bit tiring to use when cleaning an entire house. In truth, it’s fatiguing to use here, but as a handheld cleaner, jobs tend to be completed in bursts, so it’s not such a pronounced problem.

There are two power modes, standard and Boost. A physical slider changes power modes, and it’s easy to see which mode you’re in.

At just 1.9kg, the Dyson Car+Boat is at least light and easy to carry around. It’s much lighter and easier to use in handheld mode than the Gen5detect, which is a brute of a cordless vacuum cleaner.

Battery life is harder to keep track of, as there’s no screen. Instead, the battery has a set of LEDs on it that extinguish one at a time, to give you a rough idea of battery life.

Performance

• Excellent cleaning capability
• Long-life battery
• Does get tangled with hair

First, I measured the power of the Dyson Car+Boat at the handle in Air Watts. It’s an impressively powerful vacuum cleaner.

While its regular power mode came in at 45AW, which is basic cordless vacuum cleaner power, its boost mode delivered 211AW, which puts it way ahead of handheld cleaners, although behind the best cordless models.

With this much power, the Dyson Car+Boat is capable of sucking up dust from a good distance. In my rice test, I found that the vacuum could suck up grains of rice from 2cm away. That’s a good indicator that this cleaner will be good for sucking up mess from hard-to-reach places, such as between car seats and in cup holders.

I then moved on to my real-world tests, using the mini motorised tool. I began with the carpet test, adding 20g of flour to the floor. After using the standard power mode, most of the flour was gone, but I did a quick sweep with the boost mode to make sure.

I found that 99.7% of the dust was collected, which is excellent. Typically, I run this test with a floor head, and no vacuum cleaner has achieved such a result. That doesn’t make the Dyson Car+Boat better than a cleaner, such as the Ge5detect, though.

Rather, in handheld mode, the suction power is closer to the tool, so results are better; with a regular cleaner, the vacuum has to such everything up through a long wand, which is tougher. Still, what this result shows is that you can properly clean things, such as the floor of a car boot.

Next, I moved on to the edge test, adding 10g of flour up to the skirting board. Again, mainly using standard power, I found that the cleaner collected a staggering 98.6% of the dust.

I then added 20g of rice to the hard floor, and collected 100% of this mess easily using the standard power mode and crevice tool (the motorised tool tended to ping the dirt around).

Cat hair, combed into the carpet, was easily collected with not a trace of it left behind, which is good to see.

I then added human hair to the floor and used the mini motorised tool. This is not an anti-wrap tool, so my test hair got caught around the brush.

It’s less likely that you’ll face a lot of hair cleaning out cupboards, cars, caravans, boats and the like, but it’s a shame that Dyson hasn’t upgraded this tool to anti-wrap, given that it has the option on its newer vacuum cleaners.

Battery life is rated at up to 50 minutes with the passive tool. I tested with the motorised tool and got 39m 05s with standard battery life and 9m 37s with the boost mode. That’s enough battery life to fully clean out a car, or tackle a spring cleaning job around the house.

I did find the cleaner quite loud: 78.6dB on standard power and, strangely, slightly quieter at 77.4dB on boost.

Should you buy it?