I bought a robot to mow my lawn. It had other ideas, by Tobias Wren

An original contemporary review.

There is a moment, about forty minutes after unboxing the GreenGlide 400, when you believe the future has arrived. The little machine hums off its charging dock, sleek and silver, its sensors blinking a friendly blue. It glides across the grass in neat stripes. You make a cup of tea. You sit in a deckchair. You feel, for perhaps the first time in your adult life, like a person who has their weekend under control.

Enjoy that moment. It does not last.

Let me be fair. The GreenGlide costs £899 and promises to ‘take the work out of lawn care forever’. On paper, it is impressive. It runs on a rechargeable battery, connects to an app on your phone and can, according to the glossy manual, handle slopes, obstacles and ‘even the trickiest garden layouts’. My garden is not tricky. It is a rectangle with a shed in it.

First, the installation. Before the GreenGlide will move an inch, you must peg a thin wire around the entire edge of your lawn, so the robot knows where to stop. The box suggests this takes ‘around an hour’. It took me and my teenage son most of a Saturday, two arguments and one plaster. The wire must be pinned down every seventy-five centimetres. My lawn, it turns out, is very long.

Then, the personality. Within a week the GreenGlide had developed what I can only call opinions. It refused to mow near the shed. It mowed the same strip by the patio eleven times in one afternoon, as if it had lost something there. Twice it drove into the flower bed and sat among the tulips, beeping mournfully, until someone came to rescue it. The app, meanwhile, cheerfully reported ‘Mowing complete!’ while I watched the machine through the kitchen window, stuck on a molehill.

And it is not only the lawn it upsets. The blackbirds that used to pull worms from the grass now keep well away, which I count as a small tragedy. Our cat sits on the back step and stares at it with open contempt. The neighbours, who were initially curious, now simply ask, ‘Is it stuck again?’

There are genuine positives. It is quiet. When it works, the stripes are lovely. It has never once asked me for a lift to football practice.

But the question with any gadget is simple: does it save you time? After two months, I have spent longer setting up, rescuing, cleaning and apologising for the GreenGlide than I ever spent pushing my old mower around. I have downloaded three software updates. I have read an online forum thread titled ‘Why does mine keep going in circles?’ with the intensity of a detective.

Last Sunday, I got the old petrol mower out of the shed. It started on the second pull. It went where I pushed it. Forty minutes later the lawn was done, and the GreenGlide watched from its dock, blinking blue, like a pet that knows it is in trouble.

Verdict: two stars. One for the stripes, and one for the silence.

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