Honda is now bundling a new lineup of zero-turn electric lawn mowers in the U.S.
The ProZision riding mowers are assembled in North Carolina.
Honda is offering a battery pack that’s bigger than what most plug-in hybrids offer today.
There was a time when electric cars were powered by measly batteries. They could barely crack 60 miles on a full charge, and the cars themselves were ridiculously small and decontented.
However, battery technology has come a long way, and you can now get an American-made zero-turn riding mower that has a bigger battery than the first modern EV capable of safely driving on the highway. It took 15 years to get here, and things can only get better going further.
Photo by: Honda
Honda’s ProZision ZTR mower, which is assembled in Swepsonville, North Carolina, is powered by a 19.2-kilowatt-hour battery pack rated at 48 volts, which enables a runtime of up to four and a half hours. It also has no fewer than five electric motors–three for the blades and two for the drive.
Meanwhile, the 2011 Mitsubishi i-Miev was powered by a 16 kWh battery that sent power to a 63 hp permanent-magnet motor. It had an EPA-estimated range of 62 miles in the United States and a top speed of 80 miles per hour, making it the world’s first mass-market EV capable of handling highway speeds.
It could also carry four people in relative comfort, while Honda’s ProZision zero-turn mowers can only accommodate one person and its top speed is 10 mph. That’s not the point, though. The point is that it took a decade and a half to go from a 16 kWh battery that takes up much of a car’s floor to a battery that stores more energy in a much smaller footprint.
Honda ProZision ZTR autonomous electric mower
Photo by: Honda
To make things even more interesting, Honda is even offering an autonomous version of the ProZision ZTR. It comes with four lidar sensors, five radars and two GNSS receivers to enable automatic mowing, but only after an operator runs a route and saves it to the cloud. The mower then replays the route and automatically optimizes it for better turns and coverage.
It’s all very cool, but it comes at a price. The ProZision ZTR with a 54-inch blade starts from $32,999. The autonomous version, which is only available with a 60-inch blade, doesn’t have a price yet, but it’s sure to be much more expensive.
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