Sir James Dyson reveals how AI will clean your house & why he’s flogging delicious snacks to Brits instead of retiring

“NO, no, no, no, no,” Sir James Dyson tells me.

I’m squashed into the back of a classic as it whizzes me and the legendary British inventor around the streets of Berlin. I’d just asked him a very simple question.

I went for a drive around Berlin with Sir James Dyson Sir James showed off a load of new gear at a special event in Berlin last week

, the billionaire, has been showing off his new Dyson, the . It’s called the and it’s 38mm thin.

That’s about half the width of an . It basically looks like a broom.

So sensibly, I ask whether this is it. Surely we have reached the practical limits of how svelte a vac can get?

“No, no, no, no, no,” he replied.

“No, I mean, the little motor, it was unthinkable five years ago. No one was doing it.”

Dyson launched his first vac in 1983, after developing thousands of prototypes.

I ask him how the 78-year-old how his younger self would’ve reacted to seeing the PencilVac.

“Oh, I would have loved it,” he told me as we ride across the toasty German capital in a stonkingly hot car.

“We had the idea about eight years ago. Wouldn’t it be great to get everything in a broom handle? But we just didn’t have the .

“In particular, the motor. And I realised about 15, 18 years ago, that no one was developing electric motors.

“So I got together a team and we started developing high-speed digital motors. And it took some time.

“And eventually we produced one…but we got it a lot smaller.

“And then when we did the hairdryer, we got it even smaller and got it into the handle.

“And we knew at least we could make a Pencil vacuum cleaner.”

The new stick-thin PencilVac is one of Dyson’s latest gadgets

You may be wondering why we’re in a Mini. I certainly was. I only knew I was meeting Sir James – but didn’t know where.

The billionaire reached across to pull my backpack onto the rear seats, and I climbed in shortly after. Destination: .

MEGA MINI

It turns out that Sir James is a big Mini fan. In fact, he even drives the modern version now.

He gives me a colourful account of what made the original Mini so great.

I must admit, I was feeling pretty nauseous in the back. It was hot, the suspension was rubbish, and we were moving at a brisk pace.

But even still, I could appreciate what the Mini did for – and for Britain. Of course, it wasn’t always so.

“The interesting thing about it is that nobody wanted to buy it,” Dyson told me.

“They did some market research before they launched it, and the market research results were terrible.

Sir James turned up to his big Berlin event in a classic Mini

“For nine months, nobody bought it.”

He continued: “And now Dame Margot Fonteyn had one with wicker-work down the sides. And she drove it down the King’s Road in swinging .

“When King’s Road was the place to be. And suddenly everybody wanted it. And it was called the Austin 7. But it was the time of the mini-Skirt.

“So, of course, it became the Mini.”

Dyson has a similar story about his own products.

“When we launched our first battery vacuum cleaner, everybody said, you’ll never sell that,” Dyson said.

“But with it, we’ve changed people’s habits.

“So instead of waiting until Saturday to do the two-hour vacuum of the house, you just do it when you need it.

“You just grab it and do it and put it back. Or you do one room at a time or something. You don’t have to do the whole house.”

He continued: “And as you say, you don’t have to keep plugging the cord in and all that sort of thing.

“But everyone laughed when we said, well, it only runs for 10 minutes. So they thought no one would ever buy it like that.

“But gradually, we changed people’s minds.”

THE AI AGE

Of course Dyson is now contending with increasingly fierce rivalry – and the advent of AI.

One of his new gadget’s is a brainy cleaning bot called the Dyson Spot+Scrub AI Robot.

It’s meant to clean up – and yes, even wash and scrub – your floors all on its own.

“The robot – it’s washing the floor, but it’s also checking that it’s cleaned all the spots.

The new Dyson AI robot scans your floor for stains and will keep cleaning until it’s gone

“So if it sees that it’s gone over it but it hasn’t got rid of it, it turns around, does it again, checks it.

“If it hasn’t got rid of it, it turns around, does it again.

“It’ll do that 15 times. And we’ve done that because at the moment these robotic wet cleaners just go over the floor once, or maybe twice if they do a double circuit.

“But that’s not good enough. A lot of spots need a lot of water to really get rid of them.

“You keep having to put on water and rubbing it. So I think we’re solving one of the major problems of wet .”

AI isn’t just in the AI-branded gadgets either, Dyson tells me.

He said that the new Dyson AirWrap style product will adjust its flow and temperature based on your hair type, desired style, and even the tool attachment that’s fitted to the end of it.

“It’ll do everything on the hair styler automatically,” the inventor explains.

Dyson has even used AI for its hair styling products, like the new Dyson AirWrap Co-anda 2x

“So for example, when you make a curl, you heat it, and then you cool it for 10 seconds to set the style.

“And so it does all that timing for you. You don’t have to keep pressing buttons.”

BEST OF BRITAIN?

Much of the tech on show from Dyson this year was designed at the company’s sprawling campus down in Malmesbury, Oxfordshire.

I visited there earlier this year and saw countless labs built for testing robotics, durability, and even a cupboard stocked with spillage items so Dyson can properly test its vacuum cleaners.

It’s a testament to Britain that so many great minds are still inventing new gadgets and technologies on our shores.

But Sir James tells me we need to do more to stay competitive.

“We still produce wonderful engineers who are very creative and capable of thinking differently,” Dyson said.

“But we don’t have enough. We need more. And we’ve got to work faster, harder and faster, to win in the competitive world we’re in now.

Dyson has a huge campus in Malmesbury where engineers work on the company’s latest gadgets behind closed doors

“So we need more engineers, which is why I started the university.”

Of course these days, Dyson isn’t just in the electronics game. He’s also a farmer, and flogs some very delicious strawberries.

I’ve tried them, and I’m not having you on when I say they were the best strawberries I’ve ever eaten.

You can go bag a punnet for yourself from M&S – all year round.

“Well the strawberry thing was great fun,” Dyson said.

“Because we had these anaerobic digesters, which make electricity, green electricity, which we were putting into the grid.

“So we thought, what can we do with this ? Growing strawberries all year round.

“We were using the waste heat to dry grain. But you can’t dry grain all year round. So strawberries seem the obvious answer.

Dyson’s farming division is now growing strawberries all year round

“So we’re growing these strawberries with free heat.”

He added: “They’re all year round. You don’t have to import them.

STILL GOING STRONG

If it all feels like a lot for a 78-year-old, you’re probably right.

I suspect many of us would gladly retire long before then if we had the net worth of Sir James Dyson.

But he’s still at it, choosing to sit in a tiny car with me as we race towards a product launch than living out the rest of his days on a super-yacht somewhere in the Mediterranean.

I ask him why what drives him to carry on working – rather than settling down on an island with a piña colada, and enjoying the figurative and literal fruits of his labour.

“A lot of people say this, but for me, it was never the money,” Sir James told me.

“And I’m still not a businessman in the traditional sense. I don’t see myself as a businessman.

“I just love developing products and making things.

“I’ve got the bug, because that’s about growing and making things.”

He continued: “What drives me is developing things, developing technology, making products better, solving problems.

“And it’s a sort of bug you get, it’s a disease. And that’s what an engineer has. And I can’t stop.”