One failed wheel motor cost me the entire mowing season
I bought a Luba 2 AWD for about $4,000 to cut two acres of grass. When it works, it works well. Then it threw a wheel hub motor error after less than two years on a normal residential lawn. It was determined that the front right wheel hub motor had failed. This review is about the service experience from that point on. I asked Mammotion to ship me the hub motor so I could replace it. I offered to do the labour for free and write up feedback on the process for their team. No. They don't ship hub motors to customers. Opening my own machine voids the warranty. No loaner, no advance replacement. The mower goes to a service centre for 12 to 18 business days of bench time, and they would not tell me where that service centre is or how long shipping takes in either direction. The real number could be a month or more, and I don't have visibility into it. Meanwhile, the grass keeps growing—two acres of it. I had to buy another mower and spend my weekends cutting, which is exactly what I paid $4,000 to stop doing. A robot mower that disappears for a month in peak season has defeated its entire purpose. The savings are gone, the time is gone, and I'm out the cost of a second machine on top of it. What makes this genuinely absurd is that it is a battery-powered RC toy with blades on it. Every gas or diesel riding mower ever built can be worked on by its owner, with parts available at almost any store in town. Mammotion has taken a simpler machine and locked it down harder than a tractor. There is no technical reason a bolt-on hub motor can't be shipped to a customer. It's a policy decision, and it's the wrong one. If Mammotion wants this product category to survive, three things need to happen. Please make the parts available for customers to buy. Publish DIY repair videos so people can do the work. Keep service centres for owners who aren't comfortable doing it themselves. That's how every other piece of outdoor power equipment has worked for decades, and it's why those machines stay in service for twenty years. Anyone buying a robot mower needs two things: reliability, and when something does break, a same-day fix or a part in your hands within a week. Mammotion currently offers neither. I recommended this mower to several people, and three of them bought one. I won't be doing that again.