Does anyone have any experience with remote controlled mowers? Mowrator and RC Mowers have some things on the market but I have never run them. There is also a lot of remote-controlled mowers being sold on Temu and AliBaba-- that I would never risk buying. It seems like an RC mower would be really useful for hard to reach areas but may get really tedious if just mowing a flat space. In other words, I see some utility but maybe not in all cases. Any thoughts?
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I think for slopes something like a Raymo especially for safety .Not sure a small scale remote mower has much utility out side of residential. Some of these mowers like luba offer both options.
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I agree with @Golfguy. I can see this being used for difficult terrain, but it seems like it would be fun for about a day and then you would get bored and want an autonomous mower to just go out and mow.
Happy to sound off here as we were a beta tester and have worked closely with the company (attended NHS and shared a booth). The Mowrator platform was of interest because the same hardware for the remote controlled mower was going to be used for their autonomous version. I wanted to make sure it cut well and had good run times. I currently have the 2 wheel drive unit and the AWD version. The runtime is pretty good and the machine seems pretty durable and well built. That being said we had a bolt vibrate off which led to tension on a shaft that snapped so now we cannot adjust the mower cut height. As a commercial mower the cut quality and power were comparable to prosumer and close to commercial quality battery-electric mowers. Our main test field test we used it for was an HOA mowing a lot of easements for a neighborhood. With training we could maneuver them well and it saved a lot of fatigue because we would have two guys on push mowers for almost 2 hours. That being said we didn’t continue using them because it was faster to push mow and we could control the cut quality better going manually. It is a really fun unit to use and the controls have very low latency but I see it still not ready for mass adoption. I’m happy to chat more if others have specific questions.
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That is an impressive evaluation and insight. I keep asking myself if the juice is worth the squeeze for remote controlled mowers. I think, like a lot of robotic mowers, there needs to be some detailed economic analysis.
So it sounds like right now it is just not worth it overall. Is it worth having just a small one in the fleet in case some workers are out?
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I think the AWD unit could be helpful in a couple of ways still if you have the capital.
- It’s got enough power to tow some equipment around with the right setup
- It’s a decent slope mower for stubborn hillsides or even initial knockdowns
- A worker on light duty could fulfill mowing and stay busy with on the team