Sounds like gas isn't selling.

 

I don't think it's a matter of gas isn't selling. At all. There are still a LOT of lawns in North America (like mine) that battery electric just doesn't make sense for. Yet.

I do think that the recent California regulations and scuttlebutt of other states rapidly following suit is accelerating the process of sunsetting legacy engines and equipment that does not have a major slice of market share. Unfortunately, that describes the Honda walk-mowers perfectly. Good as they are, the market volume (for gas-powered residential walk-mowers) remains squarely in Toro, MTD and perhaps Husqvarna's court.

 

That is too bad. Strange times when one of the top players in residential lawn mowers bows out. One of the items they site are stricter environmental regulations. This reminds me of when Caterpillar decided to comlpletely ditch the on-road diesel truck engine business.

 

You read my mind - but this is a bit different in that when Cat bowed out of the on-highway diesel engine biz, there was a path forward. They couldn't justify the risk involved in investing hundreds of millions into R&D to comply with the new standards, but if they had wanted to, it was an option to bring an updated product to market. The California SORE regs did no such thing. They flat out banned small engines. There was no opportunity to let OEMs and their engineers make the decision if more efficient engines or battery electric was the best way forward. No updated noise thresholds, no tightened emissions standards, just anything under 25HP, F-you, go away. In a state where the cost of living for all but the uber-wealthy is a major concern, they just doubled the purchase price of the average mower. We might even see many residential DIY'rs shift to commercial lawn services as many of the engines powering large walk-behinds, stand-ons, and sit-down zero turns are well over the 25HP threshold.

 

it will sure look funny, seeing the guy mowing his 7000 square-foot lawn with a 25 hp ride on. 😆

 

No more out of place than a $6k EGo ZTR. 🎤👇

 

Lawn Care is going to be Subscriber based Autonomous Electric Mowers.

Good luck If you are the lucky Tesla, Toyota, Porsche of the lawn care who Who uses Amazon who will deliver to your door.

They will only need a SINGLE Area Rep for Quote, Install, Repair.

You will be pushed to swallow that pill.

And Honda unfortunately is not a Leader in Lawncare in the USA.

 

I look at the announcement as Honda can make more money off of ATV's right now then they can off of mowers so that is why they are making the change. Their residential mower business, I don't think was ever that big so why not covert that over to the ATV's which seem to be selling quite well these days for some reason and I'm sure have a higher margin of profit over the mowers.

 

It's a shame really because they had some excellent ideas for residential lawn equipment. Many of their tractors were powered by small parallel-twin engines, liquid cooled. So quiet, and powerful enough in their time. That engine was also in some RV generators. Other than having the hydrostatic transmission in the high-end models, none of the walk-behinds struck me as particularly excellent vs some of the alternatives. And catering to the very high-end of the market is a recipe for low-volume sales for sure. Which is why we saw John Deere make a big entry into the RLE entry-level market in the late 90's. We can debate all day about whether Deere should have kept the Sabre name and colors vs. slapping Deere decals on and painting them green and yellow, but the creation of the Sabre line, and later the Lightning platform for RLE (better known as the L100, 100, LA, D100, E100, and now the S100 series, yeah all the same basic tractor.....) is why we still have the more premium X300, X500, and X700 series, plus all the residential ZTRs we see today. They vacuumed up the market share from MTD and AYP and can pretty much do what they want with it.

In Honda's case, if we had seen a few more GC/GCV-level engines and riding machines in the $2-4k range, I think we'd be looking at a very different picture for residential equipment today. Deere pretty much quashed that though with bringing Honda Power Equipment into their C&CE dealerships, while simultaneously exiting the walk-behind residential equipment market.

And yet Stihl (who benefitted the exact same way by Deere throwing in the towel on handheld power equipment, pretty much at the same time they exited the walk-behind market) is bringing to market Ferris/Briggs Power built ZTRs that compete directly with Deere products, both residential AND commercial. Wonder how that's going to play out....

 

Gas is soon dead under two acres. Between robotic mowers and human operated battery mowers traditional gas lawn care has no future.

Noisy gas lawn equipment will increasingly be considered absurd. Toro is the way to go electric IMO. I have all the first gen EGO gear. When the large EGO wheeled items fail I will replace with Toro. I had premium Toro equipment prior to EGO and I feel somewhat cheated by EGOs performance claims.

I would never buy the first gen EGO riding mower. Very few lawns in Taiwan. Every flat piece of land is in a city or an ag field. It also doesn't snow in Taiwan.

 

I would never buy the first gen EGO riding mower. Very few lawns in Taiwan. Every flat piece of land is in a city or an ag field. It also doesn't snow in Taiwan.

North American Corporate headquarters is in Naperville Illinois with another office in Grand Rapids Michigan. I'm going to assume there's a product engineer or three sitting at either location.

 

I mow just under an acre and I will be a holdout for any electric mowers. Nothing beats the power and longevity of a good gas mower in my opinion.

 

I dont know about anyone else but when my HRN either wears out or rusts out in 10 years or so, I dont see myself even looking at a battery mower. Im not too keen on dropping $700-$1k on a push mower and having to spend another $300+ on replacing the battery every 5 years or so.
I will be most likely be going back to a manual reel mower when the time comes.

 

I've yet to see a robot mower put down stripes like my GM1000.

 

Robotic greensmowers have been a thing longer than you'd think. I remember seeing them as far back as 2010ish. They were using a different name before Cub Cadet, and they've used a couple different cutting units. The Cub Cadet stuff was all ATT if memory serves. I wonder what ever happened to the RG3 program?

 

Last year I bought the electric toro rycyler. It came with a 6.0ah battery. That wasn't enough for my 11,000 sf so I ordered an extra 5.0ah. I ended up getting an extra one shipped to me by mistake so that was a bonus. Last year I only needed 2 batteries to finish the lawn. This year I needed 2 and had to switch to the third battery for the last 1,000sf. It is quite annoying to have to stop twice to change batteries mid mow, but I got used to it. July 4th I was mowing and I went through all 3 batteries before finishing the back yard, and the batteries were HOT when I took them out. I had to borrow my neighbor's mower to finish my lawn. For people with scraggly thin lawns electric mowers are probably fine, but after getting 4" of rain in the past 3 weeks mine couldn't handle the dense tttf. I saw toro has a battery timemaster coming out soon. I was thinking about getting it since I already had batteries, plus it comes with a 10.0ah, but I'll be sticking with gas until it's completely outlawed after the experience with the battery recyler.

 

Thats the problem that I had with my Ryobi 36V and then with the Ryobi corded mower that I had. The 36V would die just before I finished mowing, so Id need like 6 4ah batteries to finish my yard. With how much thicker my yard is now, it probably would have taken all 6 batteries just to do the yard every week.
I thought the corded mower would fix the problem but it didnt have enough power, would leave uncut strips of grass and one time we went away for a week, so I didnt mow the yard for 2 weeks and the mower literally kept shutting off because of how tall the grass was.
Ive looked at the Toro 60V and they look nice it seems like they have batteries issues just like everyone else does, not to mention the batteries are pretty expensive.