The Mova LiDAX Ultra 1000 was hands down the most frustrating mower I’ve used so far. The caster front wheels made this thing completely unusable in my sandy grass no matter what I tried. So I rage quit and took it down the street to a neighbor’s house, where he and his wife spend a significant amount of time caring for their perfect lawn, perfect yard, and lovely garden. If there’s any lawn this thing should, could, will, or has to work on, it’d be theirs.
What Mova wants you to know:
Mova’s LiDAX Ultra 1000 is a real-time-kinetic-free (RTK-free) robotic mower designed for lawns up to 0.25 acre. It uses “UltraView 2.0 sensing,” which combines 360-degree 3D LiDAR and AI vision for centimeter-level navigation without boundary wires or base stations. It also features “UltraTrim edge cutting,” which allows the mow deck to shift side-to-side for close wall cuts. It has AI obstacle avoidance with night vision, app-based height adjustment from 1.2 to 3.9 inches (5 to 9 cm), dual-map support with up to 150 zones, GPS-based anti-theft tracking, and rear-wheel-drive all-terrain performance rated for slopes up to 45% and obstacles up to 1.6 inches.
On paper, it sounds legit.
JS @ New Atlas
What my experience was really like:
Week one was a disaster. I mapped the entire yard as a single area (my first mistake). I added two no-go zones that I felt could be potentially problematic (my second mistake), and sent it on its way (my third mistake).
Within the first minute or so, it got stuck on the edge of the lawn before mowing a single blade of grass, unable to turn around when the casters would hang off the tiny ledge of grass. I’m talking less than a ~2-inch-tall (5-cm) ledge. Nothing that should constitute an issue with a robomower in my experience.
JS @ New Atlas
I helped it up, thinking it was just a one-off issue (one of many, many more mistakes I made with the little Mova). After 15 minutes of it struggling to even get started, I canceled the task – that was supposed to take 8 hours and 16 minutes, according to the app – marked that spot as a no-go zone, and sent it on its way again.
To make this review a little shorter, I’ll skip all the boring details and simply say that the Mova’s AI, camera, and LiDAR are questionable at best. The mower was burying itself under shrubs and smashing into 6-inch-tall+ (15-cm+) stone walls. And after ramming the stones enough times to build itself a sort of 1.6-inch step-up ramp, it would promptly climb until it high-centered itself, blades spinning at however many RPM they can spin at.
The front bumper meant nothing to the mower. Nor did its mow deck, apparently, as it repeatedly tried to grind those walls into something shorter and perhaps more manageable for the demolition-derby robot with little-mower syndrome.
JS @ New Atlas
By nightfall, and after rescuing the robomower at least 25 more times (one of those times, I imagined NOT helping it back on path, but instead just heaving it out into the road as hard as I could, ending the review), I paused the task before it was even halfway through and sent it back to the charger for the night. Many “oms” were had that day as I channeled my inner Buddhist.
First thing in the morning, I asked it to resume. It was a day spent much-interrupted, where I repeatedly had to assist it for one reason or another. I didn’t want to cancel the task, because then I wouldn’t be able to edit all the trouble zones in the app. And I felt as though polishing this turd might finally reveal something other than a turd in the end.
JS @ New Atlas
By that night, the mower happily boop-beeped at me and returned to the dock, stating it had completed the task in 551 minutes (9.2 hours), but in actuality, it was well over 13 hours real-time … and it didn’t actually mow the entire lawn. There was a huge swath of grass across the entire yard that it simply never even touched.
But the first task was complete! Finally!
JS @ New Atlas
In the app, I marked all the danger-notes the mower had left dotted all over the map as no-go zones. All of my problems were solved (can you see this cascading pattern of mistakes I was making yet?), and the next mow, a week later, would go off without a hitch, I was sure of it.
I set the schedule for it to get started at oh-seven-hundred the following Friday.
At 10 AM on the following Friday, I received a text from my neighbor that the mower never started. I double-checked the scheduler, and it should have, but no worries – a three-hour-late start isn’t going to hurt anything. I manually clicked “go time!” in the app and sent it on its way.
Fifteen minutes later, the mower sent me a push notification telling me it was stuck again. I button-mashed “continue anyways” to no avail. It was only a few blocks down the road, so I jumped on my scooter and unstuck it … from the same spot I’d already designated as a no-go zone.
JS @ New Atlas
Again, skipping all the boring details, I went from being robo-lawnmower-man to lawnmower-babysitter-man. An obvious demotion. I had to assist the mower no less than a dozen times over the day and into the night. The final rescue was at 2 a.m. when the task was 98% complete. I stayed and watched it to be sure it finished.
The good news was that it actually did the entire yard this time. And not only that, it also did a really good job. The grass was cut perfectly, even with “slightly” dull blades from all the rock grinding it had done the week before.
Week three, and I took no chances. Frankly, I was sick of the Mova and just wanted to be done with it. I completely revised the map. I spent a couple of hours meticulously marking out every single no-go zone and why … Curb? Shrub? Fiery gates of Hell? – stuff that, honestly, it should have just known better than to mess with, in my opinion and previous experience. But I took the time to do it anyway. One might argue that I should have done that in the first place, but to be perfectly honest, all the other mowers I’ve tested before and since haven’t suffered any of the issues the Mova had.
JS @ New Atlas
Result? All the time-suck-map-work I did paid off. It didn’t require a single rescue in the 12-plus hours it was out and about. The little 1000 still reported it could do it in 8.25 hours – classic “over-promise, under-deliver” small-mower syndrome. Regardless, it spent all day out there without a single complaint, like a proud little mower doing near-silent mowy-things.
And to its credit, it did a killer job. The stripes were perfect; the grass was perfect; and the no-go zones remained untouched. No more trying to scale castle walls, no more nose-drops of death from sub-2-inch-tall curbs, and thankfully, no more push notifications asking for help.
This is the way.
JS @ New Atlas
Yes, it took far too long, and it took a ton of effort to get it right, but once it was finally dialed in – on an incredibly easy yard with flawless grass – it was 5 stars. Okay, maybe 4.5 stars because of all the initial frustration and rage …
If you have anything less than a super-easy yard with near-perfect grass, this might not be the mower for you. Keep in mind that 7,683 square feet is only 0.176 acres, and it took 12-plus hours to do … and Mova says the 1000 is good for 0.25 acres – I’m struggling to understand how the company came up with that math.
JS @ New Atlas
That being said, this is the least expensive robot mowing machine I’ve ever tested at US$1,049. Realistically, it saved my neighbor about one or two hours that they would have otherwise spent mowing that week – though they still have to use the string trimmer to clean up all those no-go zones. Ha.
Another thing I thought was pretty cool: this is the first mower I’ve used that doesn’t require RTK, which was quite nice. One less thing to set up, one less unwanted lawn ornament. I’ve since used another mower that no longer relies on RTK – it’s absolutely a nice feature and probably will become the trend as new models are being made and released. Remember when you’d have to stake guide-wires in your yard? Yuck. We really are getting spoiled with technology, aren’t we?
JS @ New Atlas
Pro tip: If you get one – or if you get any robot mower that costs less than about $2,200 – make sure you under-estimate the hell out of it and plan your maps efficiently and take the time to mark out no-go zones. You’ll thank me later.
Product page: Mova LiDAX Ultra 1000
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