12
the shredded plastic that morning than a
pigeon would have been for pooing on it. It
was just obeying its nature — to tirelessly
munch its way around a lawn.
A lot of modern technology makes our
lives more complicated or busier. Robotic
lawnmower technology achieves what
should be the highest goal of innovation:
making life easier and creating more time
to enjoy it. When I look at my lawnmower
I think of all those decades of male
suffrage. I think of men through the gener-
ations spending their weeks at work,
perhaps work designing labour-saving do-
mestic devices for women, then returning
home to uncomplainingly start a second
shift on the lawn. I think of the perpetual
growth of the grass, tangling like weeds of
guilt around their hearts. And all they
needed was a robot lawnmower.
The novelist Philip K Dick once asked,
do androids dream of electric sheep? I
can’t answer that. What I can say is that
suburban husbands definitely do.T
here is a place where my
lawnmower goes to die.
Sometimes I wake up in
the morning and see it
there, lying dew-covered
and useless in a dip by the
edge of the lawn, caught in a
part of the flowerbed that it cannot escape.
This is not the only trick used by my
wayward robot lawnmower in an attempt
to get out of work. Early on, when it first
arrived, it munched through its cable, an
act of lawnmower suicide that spoke of
a profound ennui. I, however, was not
going to let my new unwilling worker off
the hook. So I buried the cable, turned the
mower round and ordered it back to the
lawn. Since that day we have reached an
accommodation. It has got used to the
garden, and I have grown to view it as the
most helpful bit of tech to have entered
my household.
When we moved house from London to
Reading late last year I made a decision:
a robotic lawnmower would be my indul-
gence. A few years ago this was a fringe
product, owned by only early adopters and
technogeeks. No longer. Now there are
dozens of models available, many reasona-
bly priced, some eye-wateringly expen-
sive. The allure initially might have been
that they were a cool gadget. The name of
Flymo’s latest version points to
a more sellable attraction: “Easilife”. And
that was exactly what I wanted.
When we moved I made a bargain. My
wife could choose the Farrow & Ball
paints, the carpet and the kitchen tiles.
I would choose the lawnmower, and with it
I would choose freedom. The garden in our
former house was small, but it still weighed
on me every summer — a green rectangle
of relentlessly growing guilt that occupied
an hour every weekend. Our new lawn is
bigger, big enough that our predecessor
hired a gardener. I knew I did not want to
spend all my time looking at it and seeing
only work that needed to be done. So, in
the spirit of the upcoming artificial intelli-
gence dystopia that we are always being
warned about, I resolved to replace man
with machine.
I tried five lawnmowers for this feature,
from a top-of-the-range Husqvarna,which retails from £799 to £4,599 depend-
ing on the spec, to a Flymo at £649.99. In
truth, when it comes to what I need from
a lawnmower, despite the huge range in
prices, there was not much difference
between them. All bar the Bosch version
use the same docking station to charge —
each night they spend about three hours
munching, returning to their station for
more power. When I look them up I see
that they are all, except for the Bosch
machine, in fact made by the same
company, Husqvarna, which has cornered
much of the mower market.
Its brands range from the cheaper
Flymo and the rugged McCulloch, to the
luxurious and sleek Husqvarna itself.
I tested Husqvarna’s Automower 305
(£1,099), although its priciest model is a
whopping £4,599, the price of a decent
used car. The latter has built-in GPS navi-
gation and claims it can tackle steep 70 per
cent slopes. It links to your smartphone to
tell you its location so you don’t lose it on
the estate and it lets off an alarm warning
you if it is stolen. Exciting stuff. However,
for my purposes I found the cheapest, the
Flymo, to be perfectly adequate. It became
a permanent addition to the Whipple
household after the trial.
It is impossible not to anthropomor-
phise a robot lawnmower. There is some-
thing about the way it lumbers around —
tentative and yet bumbling, bumping and
crashing, then picking itself up and start-
ing again — that gives it instant person-
ality. I don’t always think of mine as a
reluctant worker. At first, as it jauntily
navigated the garden chairs, almost
completely silent, I liked to view it like a
contented sheep, but without the poo.
One neighbour, who took on one of my
trial robots, ended up calling his “Monty”.I think of the hours
of work and many
more hours of guilt
it has saved
Outside
Supermower: Could
a £4,000 robot give
me a perfect lawn?
It’s the new luxury must-have gadget for gardeners. Tom Whipple
puts five machines to the test — and vows never to look back
“When it suits me I just press ‘mow now’
and he does it,” he reported back.
My pet tortoise has been no less
impressed, and no less determined to view
ours as a fellow creature. The first time he
glimpsed the robot’s majestic shell, its
sleek and rumbling gait and the wiggle
of its departing hips, he spent the day
fruitlessly chasing it, putting on quite an
impressive turn of speed. Through his eyes
it was an erotic temptress, but I just look at
my mower with gratitude. I think of the
hours of work and many more hours of
guilt it has saved.
Robot mowers aren’t clever. Most
models just move randomly around. The
only reason they cut the whole lawn at all
is because they put in several hours a night
constantly trimming, leaving the minus-
cule clippings behind to mulch. But then
again, what is cleverness? If it is the appli-
cation of intelligence in solving a problem,
then the mowers are already several IQ
points higher than my children. My sons
may be better at navigating a garden, but
they have never done so to any useful end.
These days I find it hard to believe not
only that it took me this long to buy a robot
lawnmower, but also that it took so long for
them to be made at all. The world’s first
practical robotic vacuum cleaner was
unveiled in 1997, but the devices remain
fraught with problems, not least that they
cannot negotiate stairs. Lawnmowers
have few such difficulties. The biggest pro-
gramming issue — which many can han-
dle — is having two separate areas to mow.
Some say they don’t do as good a job as
a human. To me that’s like saying the chess
computer on my phone doesn’t do as good
a job as a human. Given I’m not Magnus
Carlsen, it still does a considerably better
job than this human. In all cases the mow-
ers were better at edging than me, and
their cut was better than my weekly or
occasionally fortnightly one. When the
mowers did go wrong it was my fault. I
hadn’t been laying the cable correctly, or
had forgotten to clear the lawn at night.
Maybe I am so clouded by my affection
for my chosen Flymo that I can’t even
bring myself to blame it for eating its way
through our deflated paddling pool. It was
no more culpable for leaving behindTom Whipple with a
Husqvarna lawnmower