We thought the rider fell off or something and it was going to crash. Then it turned and kept mowing. Park Roomba!
Another picture:
this post was submitted on 01 May 2024
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I am not saying they couldn't be all electric, but at the moment may not be the ideal choice, for efficiency and quality. Consumer electric mowers favor have independent motors for each blade. Not sure if this has to do with the physical size of the motors or something to do with voltage needed for larger motors or something else. Regardless this means that when a blade gets bogged down it doesn't have the additional rotating mass of the other blades to help it power through.
Also Looking at top of the line consumer zero turn mowers there seems to be about a 1 to 1 ratio of charge time to acres cut. With a limit of 3 acres with the largest battery pack which is about 16 Ah
According to the American Planning Association's Standards for Outdoor Recreational Areas(yes this is a thing). It seems that large parks start at 3 acres in size and parks with Athletics fields start at 10 acres. Even with a swappable battery it probably is impractical to try to do multiple parks in a day.
Simply to get early adopters on board your product you have to show your product doesn't has any decreased capability compared to current legacy options. I am sure this thing already costs more I don't think it would sell if it also mowed less.
I am sure we can get there, but it will require transition products like this.
Big blades are unnecessary with robot mowers. I'm sure there are examples of it, especially in the bigger zero turn mowers that are probably retrofits of existing riding models, but there's actually a simpler approach that works with how automation changes the way it's done.
When you're mowing every day with a robot, you only need to clip a little bit each day. When you do that, you don't need a big heavy blade. Many of those robot mowers have nothing more than a wheel with three or four razor blades screwed on at the edge. They aren't going to hit something heavy, because again, it's doing it every day and keeping everything trimmed all the time. It's safer, too.
When I've talked about my own robot mower at home to friends and neighbors, the thing people have trouble getting over is how you don't just do what you've been doing, only robot. I tell them it trims a small amount every day, and they snicker a little. Then they think about it for a moment and it makes sense.
This cascades down to how the lawn is handled by services. Instead of trying to do the current system, only robot, change the approach. Even if each park isn't going to have its own mower, there can be one truck delivering mowers all over town. Perhaps there are other models that would end up working better, but the point is that swapping out the current equipment for a robot version isn't the way to think about it.
The controller board should scale up without a big jump in cost. A larger zero turn mower doesn't need a significantly different controller to a residential mower. A big cost on those is the GPS sensor. It has to be a relatively high accuracy one for it to work, and that ability has only come down to <$300 in the last few years (it used to be "if you have to ask, you can't afford it" territory). Otherwise, it has to use a boundary wire or something like that, which is the biggest downfall of the one I have. Boundary wires suck.
Once it has enough circuitry to handle the sensors--a larger mower probably needs a few more, but not a huge amount--then it's good enough. Even if it adds $600 to the cost of a residential mower, it may only add $700 to a big zero turn. Cost gets proportionately less as the mower scales up.
I am not saying you're fundamentally wrong. Just that it is not yet practical in this space. That alone will greatly hamper long term adoption. Incrementalism has been shown to be the best way to create change.
Also I think your cost differential is wildly inaccurate. Just looking up power equivalent electric motors. They are roughly two to three times more expensive than the gas motor currently being offered. Along with that it is likely to now need water cooling. As for the controllers and sensors they might not need radically different but they do need to be radically more robust. A little quick math shows that a commercial grade mower would have somewhere between 800 and 1200 hours put on it in a summer. Where a consumer mower is going to get less than a hundred. To do this the components have to have much higher duty cycles, a larger margin to failure and greater R&D to make sure that components can handle the extra hours and a greater coverage of edge cases. Commercial and industrial equipment is not more expensive because it is significantly more capable it's more expensive because it is significantly more reliable. I could easily see an all electric commercial grade mower costing several thousand dollars more.
I have nothing against electrification it's probably a good solution for many things. Fundamentally though it cannot be driven by it being the right thing. Sadly that will just never work. It will happen faster and more effectively if it is driven by economics. I don't think the economics of electric commercial mowers is viable right now. I do think getting people's toes wet with advanced systems that can easily be electrified later will in the long run be more effective.