Walter, the cleaner you talk of was the ill-fated 8000 series. Not only did it fail to catch on in any great number, the first cleaners were filled with design faults and had to be recalled many times on many points.
The 8000 went on to become the New Wave - same cleaner but with the height control as a dial on the front and not a slider on the side. All the faults were supposed to have been rectified by then.
However, the biggest issue with these cleaners was that in solving the problem the cleaner was built for bought with it a host of new problems. We need to remember that although these cleaners were uprights, they were only upright in everyday dry-cleaning mode. To wet clean, one had to attached two large water tanks and a separate full tool kit. Vax sold these cleaners on the basis that they felt their consumer wanted an upright for everyday cleaning and thought that this was what prevented some consumers from buying a canister Vax.
However, the upright Vax was very big, very expensive, and had lots of large apparatus to be stored away from the cleaner for wet cleaning. These parts were almost as big as having a standard Vax canister. Ultimately, it was almost the same price to buy a Vax canister and a separate dry-only upright -say a Panasonic- too. Each cleaner would have excelled at specific tasks, would have cost about the same (combined) as one Vax upright, and storage wise would have taken about the same space.
What Vax should have done in my opinion was to make a basic dry-only upright cleaner to sell as a package with the wet & dry canister, or else team-up with Electrolux or Hoover to sell one of their cleaners in a package, either under the Electrolux name or badged as Vax.
The upright Vax 3-in-1 failed on so many levels.
