Robotic lawn mowers: what makes one worth keeping

Four of the 6 let you swap the battery yourself, with an official battery listed in Spain: Worx Landroid Vision Cloud 800 m², Bosch Indego S+ 500, Gardena SILENO smart sense 600 m² and Mammotion LUBA mini 2 AWD 1000. Bosch’s manual walks you through it with a Torx T-20 and five screws; Worx uses a standard 20V PowerShare pack that comes out without tools. Mammotion’s battery was listed as sold out on the day we checked.

Husqvarna sells an original battery, but it has to be synchronised at an authorised workshop after fitting. For the Segway Navimow, we found no official battery on sale in Spain.

Garden-tool brands with dealer networks still sell most parts for mowers they launched in 2018, including the battery: Husqvarna Automower 405VE NERA, Bosch Indego S+ 500 and Gardena SILENO smart sense 600 m². Bosch sells them through its own Spanish parts shop. The Husqvarna and Gardena results rely on a large Automower dealer we haven’t yet confirmed as an official partner; that check is open in our review. Worx sells blades, wheels, a cover and a charging station for its 2019 Landroid, but its motors and mainboard go through authorised workshops only.

Segway Navimow and Mammotion launched their first mowers in 2022, so they have no track record to check yet.

Blades are the only core consumable, and they’re cheap. At official prices and the maker’s intervals, a year of blades costs 9 €–123 €, or 0.6%–8.8% of the mower’s price. Bosch gives no fixed interval for its blades, only advice to replace them when they stop cutting cleanly, so we can’t compute its yearly cost.

The bigger running cost can be connectivity. Segway Navimow’s advertised 4G features need a paid plan after the first year (€29.99 a year), and Mammotion’s 4G service needs a paid renewal after three free years. The positioning service itself is free for life on both.

This is where mowers split. Bosch’s Indego follows a boundary wire and works fully on its own, with a display, keys and a built-in calendar; the app is optional. Most wire-free models find their position with RTK correction data streamed from the maker, though some also offer a local reference station. Husqvarna, Gardena and Mammotion say their mowers need that data to navigate, so they get our “Needs the maker’s cloud” red flag. Husqvarna offers an optional reference station (€462.47) to run without it.

Segway Navimow has a Local RTK mode with the antenna in the box, but needs an app account to activate. Worx doesn’t say whether its Vision Cloud keeps mowing on schedule without the internet. None of the 6 has Matter or an official local API. What happens when the cloud goes away.

All 6 match the 3 years Spanish law already requires (Husqvarna adds 6 months if you register), and none covers the mower for 4 years or more. Battery cover is often shorter: 1 year at Husqvarna and Worx, 2 at Segway Navimow. Mammotion explicitly covers the battery for 3 years.

On updates, Worx publishes a security-update end date 5 years after launch, and Segway Navimow commits to at least 5 years for its mowers. Husqvarna is the only brand whose 2019 models got firmware in the last year.

Camera mowers differ on where images go. Gardena and Husqvarna say images are processed in the mower and never leave it. Worx collects camera images for diagnostics and product improvement, and Segway Navimow’s own documents contradict each other on whether images are stored remotely.