Terra Mow V1000 Review: Show Your Lawn Some Love | WIRED

Overview

While the sci-fi future of robotic domestic servitude that was promised still eludes us, I'm happy to report that robot lawn mowers are actually good now. The Terra Mow V1000 embodies this trend by combining a relatively affordable price, easy hands-off automation, and a nice, neat finish on my lawn. It’s feature-packed and comes with a covered charging station, making it a standout package at its current

1,200 price. (I’ve seen it dip below

1,000, so watch out for sales.)

Currently topping my picks of the best robot lawn mowers, this mower has been tending my front and back lawns with minimal input from me for several weeks. While it’s not without its quirks, it has outperformed many more expensive options. Folks with regular, mostly flat, rectangular lawns under 0.3 acres (around 13,000 square feet) in size don’t need to spend more than this.

Details

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The Terra Mow V1000 is a relatively small robot mower, and it looks like one of the friendlier competitors from Robot Wars. It has two large back wheels that drive it, and a simple front caster wheel. There’s a single spinning disc underneath with three cutting blades, and you get nine spares in the box.

As with most robot mowers, the power adapter is large and may not fit your outdoor socket, so you’ll likely need an outdoor box and extension lead. The Terra Mow V100 also comes with a covered charging base to shield it from bad weather, something many manufacturers will charge you a couple of hundred extra for.

There’s no antenna or anything else to set up, because this mower relies on its triple camera system and AI to map and navigate your lawn. You can connect your phone via Bluetooth, and it supports Wi-Fi. It also comes with a year of 4G service ($19 per year after that), but you don’t need it if you have Wi-Fi in your garden. The 4G and Wi-Fi are just for firmware updates and remote control when you’re away from home. It has GPS tracking for theft alerts.

The setup was by far the easiest of any robot mower I’ve tested. Aside from not having to fiddle with wire or an RTK antenna, the Terra Mow V1000 has an automapping feature. Usually, you have to remote-control your robot mower around the borders of your lawn to define the cutting zone. I have tried other mowers with automatic mapping, but I always ended up having to make significant edits to the map. Not so with the Terra Mow. The V1000 successfully mapped my (admittedly straightforward) lawn without any input required.

The spec sheet for the Terra Mow V1000 is relatively modest. It can handle slopes up to 18 degrees, offers a cutting height of 0.98 to 2.95 inches (25 to 75 mm), and a cutting width of 8 inches (20 cm). I like that you can define different settings for different zones. Perhaps you want a finer cut or closer edge mowing on one section of lawn. It can run for 150 minutes on a full charge and takes two hours to recharge. Like most robot mowers, it leaves the cuttings to mulch, and you can set a cutting schedule in the app.

I didn’t have high expectations of the Terra Mow V1000, because it relies entirely on AI vision, which can be erratic in my experience. To my surprise, it mowed my lawn in perfect straight lines with a kind of fish-tail maneuver at the end of each turn, leaving neat but narrow stripes and a fairly uniform cut. Where the edges allowed, such as along a path, the Terra Mow cut right up to the edge. On sides with obstacles, such as a garden shed and tall plants, it left a modest border. Strips of uncut grass of various sizes seem to be unavoidable with robot mowers, but the Terra Mow V1000 got closer to finishing the job than most.

We have three cats, so obstacle avoidance is crucial, and the Terra Mow V1000 does not disappoint. I always test mowers with a football, and I also had a badminton net on the lawn with very thin posts. The V1000 was able to skirt around both without touching them.

The navigation is generally impressive, and that extends to creating paths between lawn areas and also back to its charging station. You don’t have to install the charging station on the lawn; I put mine slightly farther back, tucked out of sight next to some wooden outdoor furniture across concrete paving, and it had no issues finding its way in and out.

It’s easy to set up multiple mowing zones, and you can define no-go areas with tools that enable you to create virtual fences and shapes like rectangles, circles, and polygons. Ideal if you have a pond, trampoline, or some other garden feature you want it to steer clear of. The one weakness is that front wheel, which does not cope at all well with gravel or sudden dips in the terrain. This is just a rear-wheel-drive mower. You may prefer a four-wheel-drive mower, like the Mammotion Luba 3 AWD, if you have rough terrain or steep slopes in your yard.

Because there’s no RTK (real-time kinematic positioning), the V1000 could be a great pick for folks with a lot of tall buildings around or tree cover that can play havoc with satellite navigation.

Spot Mode might be my favorite feature of this mower. You can put it down on any area of lawn and have it mow automatically without creating a map first. You must make sure it starts out facing the direction you want lines in, and it will mow the area. This enables you to lend it out to neighbors or run it on awkward patches you don’t want to map. I’ve used it without issue on several occasions, enjoying the convenience. One time it overran onto the gravel driveway, resulting in the front wheel digging in and getting stuck. But I've run Spot Mode on that same area multiple times, and this only happened once.

It’s pretty average on noise, hovering around 55 decibels in close proximity. It will say things like “Charging” when it returns to the station, but you can tweak the volume of the voice in the app.

The V1000 also has rain detection, which works well. It’s another important feature if you live somewhere wet, as it will delay cuts to avoid churning up your lawn. You can set the sensitivity and also define an auto-resume period. It can even pull weather reports from online to avoid working when a storm is forecast. Because it relies on AI vision cameras, the V1000 cannot operate at night, as some mowers can.

The app is pretty feature-packed too. There’s even a live camera option, so you can see from your mower’s perspective as it mows. While the app is functionally great, there’s some messy translation and grammar that are distracting. I encountered a few bugs too, such as when creating my lawn map, it named it “map 3” for some reason, even after I renamed it manually. I’ve completed a couple of firmware updates, and though they took a long time, both were successful.

The Terra Mow V1000 was

1,400 on release, but the RRP seems to have dropped to

1,199, which compares very favorably with other options on the market. I have seen it drop as low as $949, which is a bargain for a robot mower this good. Although I haven’t tested it, Terra Mow also offers the cheaper V600, which covers half the area of this mower.

If you have a huge lawn to cover, gravel borders, or difficult terrain, you might prefer something else from my Best Robot Lawn Mowers guide, but for the average lawn, the Terra Mow V1000 is ideal.

Key Takeaways

While the sci-fi future of robotic domestic servitude that was promised still eludes us, I'm happy to report that robot lawn mowers are actually good now
Currently topping my picks of the best robot lawn mowers, this mower has been tending my front and back lawns with minimal input from me for several weeks
The Terra Mow V1000 is a relatively small robot mower, and it looks like one of the friendlier competitors from Robot Wars
As with most robot mowers, the power adapter is large and may not fit your outdoor socket, so you’ll likely need an outdoor box and extension lead