Review: Husqvarna 435X AWD Automower

I hate mowing the lawn. First off, a vast expanse of unproductive grass is a waste—why have grass when you could have a garden, or an orchard, or all sorts of other useful plants? That I have to push around a device just to maintain this green wasteland makes it doubly insulting.

Fortunately, this summer I unleashed the Husqvarna 435X AWD automower on my lawn. Now I never have to think about mowing it again.

The Husqvarna 435X is the high-end, all-wheel-drive version of the company's robotic lawn mower line; Husqvarna has less-expensive models that can accomplish the same thing. The 435X costs more because it's specifically designed to handle sloping yards and rough terrain, both of which are landscape features at the house I rent. 

The results of the 435X far exceeded my expectations. Admittedly, my expectations were low: Just make it so I don't have to mow the lawn. The 435X is capable of much more than that. I never ran into problems, aside from getting hung up in fallen tree branches from time to time. In over six months of testing, that was the only trouble it ever had. It produced the healthiest, most well-manicured lawn in our area. Every delivery person that came to our house asked about both the lawn and the curious creature roaming it. 

The secret to the 435X's lawn-care prowess lies in the spinning razor blades. Yes, the 435X is an automated robot equipped with spinning razor blades. (I always made a point to be polite and kind to it, in hopes that it will spare me in the inevitable robot uprising.) Because it mows much more regularly than you or a lawn service would, the 435X cuts tiny pieces of grass at a time. This is the secret to a healthy lawn. When you let grass get long and then mow it back, you leave significant piles of cut grass behind—even if you use a catcher. These piles smother the grass that's trying to grow, opening the ecological playground of your yard to weeds.

There is one secret to getting the perfect lawn from your robot helper: Change the blades regularly. Husqvarna's official recommendation is to change your blades every one to two months, with the caveat that it will vary depending on the type of grass and soil at your house. I found every two months to be about right. For testing purposes, I let it go considerably longer, and the quality of mowing suffered. I also found that it's good to check regularly to make sure all the blades are still there. I twice lost blades to branches that had fallen and passed under the automower.

The other thing you will still need to do is clear any lawn debris. At my house, the lawn is shaded by some 100-year-old pecan trees. They're wonderful for shade, but they drop branches pretty regularly in the wind. Those hung up the 435X if I didn't clear them. Still, picking up the occasional tree branch is a small price to pay.

Photograph: Husqvarna

The 435X is relentless. It mows rain or shine, night or day, whenever and however much you want it to mow. I played with this quite a bit, mowing all day every day versus mowing every few days and only a couple of hours. I did not keep precise track, but it seemed to cover the roughly one-acre of lawn it was tasked with in about six hours of mowing.

The results for mowing daily were not noticeably different than mowing three days a week, so that's how often it ran for most of the time I had it. I ran it three days a week, six hours a day, to cover about an acre of lawn, and did not notice any impact on my electric bill no matter how frequently it mowed. 

You schedule mowing on the Husqvarna app, which makes it easy to set your times, or turn it off, as I once did when heavy rains caused our yard to flood. The 435X connects via Bluetooth and also has GPS for mapping your yard. The far edge of my yard was beyond Bluetooth range to my house, so occasionally the Automower would get stuck and I would not know, because it couldn't transmit, but most of the time it was not an issue. If you're not a fan of the app, you can use Alexa and Google voice commands as well. It's even possible to use If This Then That to send messages to other devices.

The 435X is also something your mower or lawn-care service probably isn't: silent. Every now and then, the machine would make a noise when it hit something like a small branch, but most of the time it was totally silent.

That brings me to the safety features. The automower detects obstacles and will stop on very light impact. I tested this with everything from my feet to a car I parked in the automower's mowing area, and it never failed. The automower also has an alarm that will sound and a GPS tracking system that will allow police to locate the mower should it be stolen. But anyone who took it would find it hard to use, since you need to know a four-digit PIN to gain control of it. But I did put the base station charger at the back of the yard, well away from the street, so that at night anyone driving by would be unlikely to see it.

Photograph: Husqvarna

The 435X is shaped slightly differently than other Husqvarna automowers so that it can handle slopes and uneven terrain. It has two sections, linked by a bridge. The front has two large wheels and headlights. It's also where you'll find the color LCD panel, which can be used to configure the mower without the app. The back end uses two smaller wheels on a pivot to turn the mower. Because it has two separate sections, the 435X can handle uneven ground.

There are two things I don't like about the Automower 435X. The first is the price. At $5,200, this is fantastically expensive. However, if you're already paying for a lawn service, it might pay for itself before too long. You also gain something that's hard to put a price on: silence.

The other downside is that the range of automowers is limited. I live on a three-acre property, and alas, the 435X could mow only one-third of that area. The 435X must be fenced by a metal strip in the ground (which can be professionally installed, or you can do it yourself) so you can't rotate coverage by mowing one acre one week and another the next. Still, if you can afford it, the 435X is probably the best, most helpful device I've ever tested.