Any appliance that is plugged in constantly can serve a hazard to a child. I know many who have the Dyson hand held and similarly cordless sweepers plugged in constantly - but they genuinely have safer parts of plastics where little fingers won't necessarily get a severe wound - and whilst they need it to be constantly charged for use - the Panasonic design, was sadly highlighted by a child having an accident - but then there was no other brand who had an open ended brush roll on the market at the time.
Well, the destruction that was caused by one of my Twin bin uprights when I foolishly removed the cover plates resulted in the Panasonic tearing paint off down one side of a skirting board. Is that carelessness? No its a perfect example of where an upright vac is supposed to clean right to the edge. The covers made sense. They prevented damage from happening as much and not as severe.
Another time, loose threads from the side of carpets that normally the upright would just brush dirt into the suction channel got wound up at the sides of the brush roll, causing the brush roll to overload, belt stretch, belt broke and getting the tangled carpet thread off the side of the brush bar was harder than getting it off the middle where the two areas of the plastic beater "wave" met. The science behind overloading one side of the roller brush then resulted in the roller brush having to be entirely replaced since it bent out of shape. There is a reason to why Panasonic incorporated grills into the edge brush covers - suction could suck the dirt in as opposed to driving loose threads in and warping the brush roll/damage to the belt.
I am somewhat surprised that you need an open ended Panasonic for proper edge brushing - I found, compared to many other uprights at the earliest stage of my vacuum cleaner collecting, that the best ones was the TP2 and TP3 uprights. The Junior U1104 was also pretty good at getting right up to the edge, but both as you know had that design added to their floor heads and chassis.
