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In early April, the Honda team invited media personnel, including Landscape Management, to its North Carolina R&D and manufacturing facility for the first time in seven years.
The Honda Mower Media Event showcased the company’s newest line of battery-powered ZTRs and push mowers, as well as the engineering, design and testing that goes into each machine at the facility.
“We want to build on and leverage what we’ve always been known for, which is durability, reliability and cut quality,” says Bradley Adams, assistant manager at Honda. “We want to still be a leader in that area, just modernized with battery power. We recognize that the industry is shifting toward battery power for multiple reasons, and now the consumer is more accepting of it than ever. We want to be in the space, but we want to continue to be what Honda has always been.”
The event started with a presentation and a tour of Honda’s manufacturing factory, showcasing how the Honda ProZision ZTRs are put together and tested. After a quick lunch, the group shifted to the R&D center, which featured multiple specialized rooms and areas for testing mower and material durability, temperature tolerance, potential failure points, deck strength and more.
The headliner of the event was the ability to test Honda’s latest line of battery push mowers, the ProZision ZTR and the ProZision Autonomous ZTR. The autonomous mower, which is launching soon, features three sets of MicroCut twin blades just like the manual version and comes with the ability to teach the mower a particular route, record it and accurately replay it for future jobs at that site. The mower will even remember specific actions performed by the operator during the recorded mow, including deck height adjustments, speed changes and blades turning off and on.
And with a focus on cut quality, responsive controls, operator comfort and low noise levels, the Honda team drove home the point that battery and autonomous solutions are the way of the future, and they plan on finding their space in that market.
“I think (autonomy) is trying to keep up with what the market is going to do,” says Brian Doklovic, project lead of ZTRs and project manager at Honda. “We have predictions of where we see autonomous cutting happening, but I think when it gets into the landscapers’ hands and the commercial users, they’re going to find different uses for it that we haven’t predicted.”
