Grass has got humanity wrapped around its little finger. We carried our favorite grasses with us from the savannahs of Africa as we spread across the world, and even tens of thousands of years later, we're so desperate to be among it that a house doesn't feel like a home for many folk without patches of grass around it.
Now look, I like a bit of greenery as much as the next fella, but I'm sure I don't have to tell you that grass is a pain in the butt. If you find yourself responsible for some grass, you're required to submit yourself to a fortnightly lawn care ritual, because some neighbors will get real crotchedy if they feel your grass is receiving sub-standard care. No, really, some people get very fired up about this.
So up and down we push our little mowers, burning fuel and absorbing ultraviolet rays. It's even a job for some folk, since we humans don't seem to like assembling for large-scale recreation unless there's vast fields of grass around that have been lovingly cared for. We're weird as hell.
I'm not sure I can think of many ideas more exciting to me than autonomous, electric robot mowers. It delights me that they're now available for home use, and my excitement about the idea of one day owning one borders on undignified.
Many times I've watched a lonely man in a loose shirt and a baseball cap sit on a ride-on mower, hours of his life ticking away as it crawls across a vast field in a slow spiral. Some folk might find that meditative, I suppose, but maybe those folk might find meditation even more meditative. Either way, here's a robot that's coming for the gig.
FireFly Automatix has officially launched an enormous, electric, autonomous mega-mower capable of cutting a 100-inch (2.54-m) swathe everywhere it goes.
FireFly says this monster of a thing will rip through 25 acres (10.1 ha) of grass before it needs to return to its base for a two-hour charge-up. As a "journalist," it's my solemn duty to translate that into standard metrics: that's 18.9 NFL football fields. The company has no comment on how many Olympic swimming pools full of grass clippings will result.
It does, however, also say it'll handle about 7 acres (2.8 ha or 5.3 NFL football fields) per hour. That's a lot, but it's largely a factor of the hundred-inch width. You can beat it with a US$76,299 144-inch eXmark Lazer, which handles 11.5 acres (4.7 ha or 8.7 football fields) an hour, but then you'd need to pay about 7.7 times as much for the energy its diesel powertrain uses as opposed to the FireFly's electricity – as well as paying more than double for maintenance.
Of course, you'd also need to pay for a guy with a baseball cap and a loose shirt, and those ain't cheap. Mind you, somebody probably needs to wander around the space moving soccer goals around, picking up glass bottles and making sure there's nobody napping on a picnic rug that might get mowed against their will.
Check it out in the riveting video below, which is only marginally more fun than watching grass grow in the first place.
Source: FireFly Automatix