Landscape Management recently attended the 2025 Zero-E Expo in Campbell, Calif. Now in its fourth year, the event — hosted by Gardenland Power Equipment — has grown to more than two dozen vendors and more than 600 attendees. The expo is unique in that all the landscaping tools on display are battery-powered.
Three manufacturers — Gravely, Segway and Mowrator — showed us three different mowers with three different applications. To see videos of these presentations, visit here.
Segway Navimow
Jerrod Pehle, regional sales manager, Pacific Northwest
“We manufacture robots that can mow lawns from an eighth of an acre up to two-and-a-half acres. Our new robot is packed with features. It uses RTK satellite with 4G, multiple cameras and bump sensors for safe mowing. There are no wires. It’s designed to give you back time. You can use this mowing time for other tasks on a residential or commercial site.
“Our X3 series mower has three cameras. It will sense if there’s a dog, a ball, a tree and avoid obstacles. One of the benefits of having these cameras is it can tell where it’s at if you lose RTK signal. It will operate in tree cover. It’s designed to operate no matter what.”
Mowrator
Dean Kanemitsu, president, TMC Power Equipment
“The Mowrator is a robotic lawn mower that is operated by a remote control. There is a two-wheel-drive and a four-wheel-drive model. It’s ideal for any type of application where you’re using a 21-inch walk-behind. The four-wheel-drive is ideal for mowing slopes. The unit has a 21-inch rotary blade, a steel deck and aluminum frame. Safety features include ultrasonic sensors that surround the front; there’s also a bump sensor on the front so if you have a collision, it will automatically stop itself and stop the blades.
At the push of a button, it will do straight lines, and it will also make zero-turns. It will also dump the clippings. There are three different speeds. We’re seeing interest in landscape applications with areas that are hard to access.”
Gravely
Cole Brown, West regional sales director, Ariens
“We’re showing our latest and greatest in electric zero-turn mowers. We offer 48-, 52- and 60-inch options, both sit-down and stand-on, side-discharge or rear-discharge. There are three reservations people have with electric: run time, power and the overall feel of the machine. We’ve tried to soften all those in a couple different ways.
The first, run time — our machines offer four four-kilowatt batteries, for a total of 16 kilowatts. What makes them unique is your ability to remove them and interchange them. On average, you’re going to get five to six hours of blades-on mow time. If you are a true cutter and need eight hours or more, we can offer that by adding more batteries as if you were refueling a fuel tank. That range time anxiety that many cutters have is eliminated by the ability of going to an interchangeable battery system.
The next piece — the spindle motor and cut quality. There’s a feeling that electric products don’t cut as aggressively or bring as much power. We run three-and-a-half kilowatt spindle motors. That’s going to be larger than almost any competitor. It gives you a true gas-powered cut quality; there’s nothing lost in the ability to get into tall grass or wet grass.
Last, but not least — the overall feel. We’ve engineered these with proprietary electric planetary wheel motors to give you the same feel you’d have on a gas machine. Some mowers maybe have a little delay or just feel like not what you’d expect from a professional piece of equipment. This mower is very smooth, very intuitive. So these three core areas are what we’ve brought to the market to address those primary concerns with an electric product.”
