Flicken Awesome: Overhead Auxiliary Switch Caps. Why Your Next Gen Deserves Better.

Mount Stirling, Victoria - Photos by Geolian

Go On, Flick My Switch... We’re glad you asked. From the beginning, switches were always going to be part of our ecosystem. Not because we had to include them, but because we genuinely believed the category deserved more thought than it was getting. Most of the industry views switches purely through a functional lens. We get it, they are functional. But functional and boring are not the same thing, and the interior of a build deserves the same attention as what’s bolted to the outside.

When the Next Gen hit the market and customers started asking questions about the overhead panel, we started paying attention. The factory solution worked, six pre-labelled switches, Aux 1 through to Aux 6. Clean. Logical. And about as inspiring as reading a terms and conditions document, which nobody does, ever. The labelling gave the driver zero visual context in a hurry. If you’re running a light bar, a fridge, a compressor, and a set of rock lights, trying to remember which Aux does what in the dark at 11pm is not ideal. So we went to the drawing board.

A few weeks of iteration later, we had our first prototype. A completely in-house designed Overhead Switch Cap, 3D printed, tested, adjusted, printed again. We weren’t trying to replicate what Ford had done. We were trying to improve on it and make it our own. The brief was tighter than it sounds. The cap needed to suit the factory overhead mounting clips exactly, no modifications, no adapters, no drama. It needed to be visually distinctive while still looking like it could have come from the factory floor. Icons needed to be legible in low-light conditions. The overall fitment across all six caps needed to feel considered and symmetrical and in a full array alignment, all the icons needed to be the same scale, obviously.

“We spent more time on a switch cap than most people spend planning an entire build and to be honest, we’d do it again…"

Product Render (DEXON HQ), Victoria - Photos by Geolian

Designed In House. Obviously. Pulling design cues from our own logo, sharp lines, inverted angles, deliberate use of depth, we slowly but surely worked through every detail. One of the calls that came out of early prototyping was the addition of tactile finger grip pads. Small detail. Big difference. The kind of thing you don’t notice until it’s there and then can’t imagine being without. Each icon was scaled individually to sit correctly on the allocated face, legible at a glance without needing to squint and the end result, in our completely unbiased opinion, is what these things should have looked like coming off the production line. Feel free to take notes Ford “wink”.

The Emoji range. Yes, really. Look, we knew this one would divide the room. And honestly? We were fine with that. The emoji range wasn’t a late addition or a marketing stunt. It came from the same place as our Toyota switch range, a genuine belief that not every product needs to take itself this seriously. There is a very real market of Next Gen owners who want the functional icon range. The light bar icon. The compressor icon. The fridge. We have those too. But there’s also a group of people who will absolutely use our Eggplant Emoji to toggle their canopy lighting and frankly, we are here for it.

And look, if the devil emoji is what you’ve assigned to the RGB rock lights that come on after the second whiskey around a campfire, who are we to argue? That’s the whole point. Personalisation. Character. A build that actually reflects the person driving it, right down to the switch panel. Our emoji range is unapologetically cheeky. That was 100% intentional. We believe life’s too short for a boring switch panel especially one you need to look at every day. The icons have been carefully designed to emit light cleanly through the backlit system, which brings us to the next part.

How the backlighting actually works. The factory overhead switch unit operates a two-stage backlit system, and understanding it matters if you want to get the most out of our switch caps. In its passive state, ignition on, no switches active, each cap is illuminated by a low-level pale blue backlight. Subtle. Always on. Enough to locate your switches in the dark without torchlight. When you toggle a switch to active, the backlight shifts from passive blue to a vibrant orange, telling you instantly that the accessory is live. Two colours. Two states. Simple and effective. Smart move Ford.

Our caps slot directly into the factory overhead unit, no wiring, no modifications, no electrician required*, maybe (we always recommend using a professional). The powered unit that houses the switches controls all the lighting and electrics. You’re simply replacing the cap face. The backlight passes through the icon on the cap, which is why we spent a significant part of the prototyping process getting the icon depth and light-emitting properties right. Too much diffusion and the icon blurs. Too little and it goes dark. We ran through more iterations on this than we’d like to admit before landing on what we were happy with. The installation guide and video makes the whole process clear, most people are done in minutes.

Mount Stirling, Victoria - Photos by Geolian

“We built the emoji range for the people who don’t take their build too seriously and those people are our favourite kind of people, sometimes"

The Box Nobody Expected Us To Care About The box it comes in, beautiful, we know. Some people are going to skip this section and head straight to the product listing and be adding to cart. That’s completely fine. We see you. For everyone else, this part matters more than it might seem. One of our founders set a clear goal early on: remove plastic from our packaging, no negotiations. Not as a marketing position. Just because it’s the right call. If you look at the broader 4WD accessories industry, plastic packaging is still the default. Blister packs, plastic inserts, foam on top of foam, most of it ends up in landfill, and some of those plastics take decades to break down, if they ever fully do.

Make The Switch, We Dare You Each DEXON Overhead Switch Cap is seated in a custom pulp surround to hold the cap snugly, wrapped in an outer cardboard carton with a sleeve showing the product and all essential information. The pulp itself is made from a mixture of recycled cardboard, paper and wood grain fibres, processed through an extensive forming and drying sequence before it ever sees our product. It’s fully recyclable and biodegradable. Given enough time, it returns to the ground without leaving a trace. Small product. Considered packaging. We think those two things should go hand in hand regardless of what’s inside the box. And, to be completely honest, those who have gone done this route will know, it isn’t the cheapest solution, however it doesn’t dictate the outcome and the good, for all of us.

A small product that earned its place. We’ve put hundreds of hours into this. Design iterations, prototyping, backlight testing, icon scaling, manufacturing refinements. It would have been significantly easier to stamp Aux 1 through 6 onto six caps and call it day. A lot of people wouldn’t have noticed the difference. But that’s not really how we operate. The DEXON Overhead Auxiliary Switch Caps are compatible with the Ford Ranger Raptor, Ford Ranger with the optioned overhead panel, fresh to the scene, Ford Ranger Super Duty, and a range of USA-market vehicles running the upfitter switch format. Six caps per set. Designed to look like they belong. Built to be noticed when you look twice and a guaranteed conversation starter in any build, eggplant and all.

Oh and their design registered. Because if you’re going to spend that long on a switch cap, you might as well protect it. Flicken awesome.

The DEXON Overhead Auxiliary Switch Caps are available now via dexon.com.au

Frasier Island, Queensland - Photos by Miles