Husqvarna’s Pricey Nera Robot Mower Is a Cut Above

The life of a reviewer can be tough. Tennyson once said, “’Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all”, but he never had a robot lawn mower. Trying out amazing gadgets you can never afford to buy is awesome, but after a summer with the Husqvarna Nera, the thought of returning to a manual mower has me distraught. Sometimes it is better not to know what you’re missing.
The Husqvarna Automower 410XE Nera (£3,097) is about as swanky and feature-packed as robot lawnmowers come. The closest equivalent model sold in the US is the slightly more capable 450X EPOS bundle ($5,900). With a thoughtful design and satellite navigation, these lawnmowers are designed to be the ultimate hands-off chore busters, quietly and efficiently keeping your lawn regulation height without complaint—and more importantly, without you having to lift a finger.
I can’t see a robot mower without thinking about the Robot Wars show, but Husqvarna’s design is smart- and classy-looking, with built-in headlights and a big H for the Husqvarna logo like you’d find on the front of a car. It has two big back wheels with thick, knobbly tread to ensure easy traction on slopes and muddy ground. (It can handle slopes up to 30 degrees.)
The Nera’s two front wheels are like multidirectional office chair casters. They are cleverly set back so that the front edge, which contains three spinning razor blades, overhangs to extend out over the edges of your lawn and eliminates the uncut grass verge that most robot mowers leave behind, because they can’t get close enough.
Even though there’s no need for boundary wire, setting up the Nera 410XE took a wee while, as you must find a good position for the satellite aerial and charging base, connect them both, check you can get a clear signal, and run cable to plug everything into an outlet. I had the help of a Husqvarna rep, but the process is something you could easily do yourself. The limitation of this mower is that it needs an open line of sight to the sky. Tall buildings, trees, and other obstacles will prevent it from navigating accurately, so if you have dense woods around or near your garden, it is not suitable for you.
The 410XE I tested can cover around 1,000 square meters, more than enough for the largest UK gardens and overkill for my modest backyard. The 450X US version can cover up to 2.5 acres and steeper slopes up to 45 degrees. To mark out the area you want it to cut, you connect to the Husqvarna app on your iPhone or Android phone and remote control it around the yard. This creates a mapped area with a satellite photo beneath, and it is delightfully easy to drag and tweak the boundaries. You can set up multiple mowing zones.
You can also set a schedule in the app so that your mower takes care of your lawn automatically, choose your preferred cutting height (20 to 55 mm), and access other options like object detection, weather timer, and spiral cutting. It is smart enough to navigate around obstacles, mostly (more on that later), it returns to its charging base when it needs to, and it cuts frequently, dropping the grass cuttings to mulch, which is better for your lawn and means there is nothing to empty or dispose of.
There is a display on the Husqvarna Nera (believe it or not, you can play Doom on this thing) to show what it is doing and allow you to change settings via a dial. Press the big red button on the back to stop it, should you need to. It has an IPX5 rating, so rain is nothing to worry about for the mower or the charging station.
I marked out my front and back gardens as zones to cut and created a work schedule of 8 am to 2 pm every second day. The 410XE can mow for up to 100 minutes on a full battery and takes around 90 minutes to fully charge, but it tends to cut in shorter bursts and return to the charging station to top up in between. I never noticed any noise, but it can get as loud as 60 decibels, still well short of a traditional mower. The 450X can mow for up to 210 minutes and takes only an hour to charge.
I watched the first couple of runs with interest and then tweaked the map in the app to ensure the mower covered my entire lawn. You must connect via Bluetooth to access certain functions on the 410XE on your phone. I found the Android app reliable and easy to use. The mower got stuck once in the first week when it veered into the bed next to its charging station, and again several weeks later when it got stuck under a wooden table I had moved. Other than that, over the past four months, it has been plain sailing. You can tell a good gadget by how little you need to think about it; by that measure, the Nera 410XE is a very good gadget indeed.
The obstacle avoidance is solid. I can put out the whirligig to dry clothes, and there’s no need to worry about stray footballs or lawn chairs. Branches and overhanging plants can get eviscerated (part of my rhubarb plant did), but small obstacles don’t seem much of a problem, and the 410XE is good at avoiding larger things. The only disaster we had was with a deflated paddling pool that I forgot to move. (It got chewed up.) I also found the 410XE Nera surprisingly good at operating in the rain with minimal mud churn.
If you only have one mowing zone, you will likely never need to do anything to the 410XE. Because I set a front garden zone and the path between the two is narrow, between two houses, and with a latched gate, I had to carry the mower into the front garden to have it cut that zone and take it back when it had finished. It sometimes took a while to establish a signal and figure out where it was before it got going, but it always worked. Ferrying it around is a minor hassle, but it would be great if it could have made its way there and back. Incidentally, the 410XE has a geofencing feature, so it will warn you immediately if it goes outside your defined zones, and GPS tracking can be shared with police in the event of a theft. (It also requires a PIN to change settings on the mower itself.)
The 410XE has done an exemplary job on my lawns. They have maintained a consistent height and unfamiliar neatness all summer, and it has been lovely to gaze out at tidy yards without giving up an hour of my time every weekend. The big stumbling block is the cost. I figure I could pay a weekly gardener or neighborhood kid to do it for several years for the price of this mower, but then it’s not really designed for gardens as small as mine.
The Husqvarna engineer who pwned me on Doom showed me his map, and his mower covers a huge communal lawn in his hometown. That might be the best way to justify buying a Husqvarna Nera, because it’s just too expensive for most folks. But if you have a large area to cover or you can split the cost and share the mower, it is a truly trouble-free way to keep your lawn pristine.
Comparing the Husqvarna Automower 410XE Nera to the EcoFlow Blade (6/10, WIRED Review), the Husqvarna is superior in every regard. We had an equally excellent time with the last Husqvarna we reviewed, the 435X (9/10, WIRED recommends). The 410XE is a thoughtfully designed, beautifully engineered, labor-saving gadget. If you can afford it, say goodbye to mowing the lawn for good.