GoKawiilToday's robot lawn mowers are better than ever, with superior, often wire-free navigation and the ability to tackle more complex yards. The downside is that the best robot lawnmowers can cost you anywhere between $1,000 to $3,000, with top-tier models going for as much as $5,000.
That's what makes Volta's "Robot-as-a-Service" model so interesting. Instead of buying the robot mower outright, you lease it via a monthly subscription fee until you've fully paid it off, at which point you can choose to continue paying a lower subscription rate for remote functionality or halt the subscription entirely.
If you're subscription-weary, this may not be appealing, but as someone who didn't want to spend thousands on a robot lawnmower that couldn't handle my large, complex lawn, I found it made sense. I deployed the Volta in a real-world setting to see if subscription robot lawn care is the wave of the future or an unfortunate blip.
What is Volta?
The Volta lawn mower mowing circles on my lawn. The pattern is a little erratic, but it gets the job done. Alan Bradley/CNET
The Volta Smart Robot Lawn Mower or, more cheekily, the Volta Lawn Companion, is a compact, AI-driven mower that relies on Global Navigation Satellite System and built-in sensors to navigate your lawn. The company emphasizes that the system doesn't requires any cumbersome buried wires, antennas or other boundary markers to guide the bot, which is designed to learn and evolve with each mowing session on your property.
This isn't necessarily groundbreaking; many of our top picks tested at CNET now support LiDAR navigation, vision or wireless RTK to help you cut the cord. However, in Volta's case, the system is iterative. Instead of one major mowing session each week, the robot makes a series of smaller, frequent passes to keep your lawn exquisitely trimmed without building up excessive grass clippings. Volta's Lawn Intelligence system will gather data about your lawn's grass, terrain and microclimates over time and learn how your lawn responds to rain, heat, shade and mowing patterns, then automatically refine its behavior in response.
That's all a long-winded way of saying that it's using AI to improve mowing over time, which is what a lot of robot lawn mower manufacturers are doing these days. The key that makes or breaks them is how well this works in practice, which is what I set out to test.
How the Volta subscription model works
The Volta comes with three different subscription tiers, or you can buy it outright. Alan Bradley/CNET
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