Personally, I’ve always hated mowing the lawn. The idea of a robot that can do it for me, and well, is a dream come true. This is what the ECOVACS Goat A3000 LiDAR Pro promises to its customers. In some ways, it’s very impressive, but it’s not the perfect replacement for a manual lawnmower.

7/10

Brand

ECOVACS

Cutting Width

33cm

Dimensions

680*583*336mm

Charging Time

70 Minutes

The ECOVACS Goat A3000 LiDAR Pro is a fully automated AI-powered robot lawnmower with a suite of useful features, including adjustable cut height, mowing speed, direction, modes, and the capability to work on significant slopes. It’s ideal for traditional suburban lawns, capable of cutting large areas of grass in very little time.

Pros & Cons

• Extremely quiet mowing and trimming
• Light enough to pick up and move around by hand
• Manual mode ensures you can always get the job done yourself
• High waterproof rating means you can clean it with a hose
• Incredibly easy setup, both physically and digitally

• Automated voice is quiet, can be difficult to hear even when nearby
• Cannot start automatic operation away from the base station
• Will not cut grass taller than 7.9 inches
• Struggles on hilly, uneven terrain

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Price and Availability

To buy just the ECOVACS Goat A3000 LiDAR Pro without any special accessories directly from ECOVACS, it’ll cost you $2,500. However, there are a couple of extra accessories you can buy with the product that increase the price anywhere from $60 to $190 extra. These accessory kits can include extra blades, a garage to shelter the lawnmower, or both.

Outside of that, there is no customization. The Goat A3000 comes only in white. Your purchase of the default package will include the Goat A3000, a docking station, a trimmer, some brushes, an extra set of blades, a rubber cap for the LiDAR, screws, a charging cord, and an impressively large instruction manual. You can find this AI-powered lawnmower being sold at many third-party retailers, but the price varies by quite a bit depending on where you look.

Easy setup right out of the box

The Goat A3000 is a fairly heavy and sizable machine, so it comes in a pretty large box, but moving that box around is the hardest part about setting everything up. Though the Goat is a good twenty pounds or so, it’s easy enough to lift with some safe, easy spots to grab it. When you open the box, you’ll be treated with an instruction sheet so large it’ll seem more like a set of blueprints. But to actually set up the Goat A3000, you only need to attach some brushes and a trimmer with simple screws.

Credit: Jacob Hudson / How-To Geek

After that, you’ll need to find a place outside to put the docking station and screw it into the ground itself. This only takes a few minutes, and the product comes with the hex wrench you’ll need to get things situated. After that, you push the Goat A3000 into the charging dock, let it get to at least 50% battery, then load up the required ECOVACS Home app to connect to it. You’ll need to put a pass code on the lawnmower itself, which you have to manually input.

Once all this physical stuff is done, it’s pretty easy to set up the actual mowing and trimming part of this device. Using the app, you’ll have to take manual control of the Goat and drive it around the edges of the area you want it to cut, just like setting up zones for a smart vacuum cleaner inside your house. Once this zone is designated, you can easily set the Goat to operate within it using the app.

Excellent cutting… when everything is ideal

The Goat A3000 is very nifty. You can control its mowing speed, its mowing height, the direction it mows your lawn in, and lots of other things. It can avoid animals, people, and obstacles. You can set it to avoid running during rain or certain hours. The level of customization is great, and physically, the robot moves around very well. However, how effective it can really be depends a lot on how traditional your lawn is.

On flat, even ground with easily navigable boundaries, the Goat A3000 does great. That makes sense, since most lawns are pretty flat. And by flat, I don’t mean that the Goat can’t do slopes; it easily handles slopes of more than thirty degrees. In an ideal environment, the Goat A3000 Pro is exceptional. But the less ideal your cutting area is, the more it struggles to really do an excellent job.

Curved boundaries can be a problem for trimming

Part of it is my fault. My cutting area is a weird shape with a lot of curving boundaries. It’s pretty bumpy, thanks to some holes my dogs have dug back there. And I don’t cut it terribly often, so there were some pretty tall tufts of grass here and there. All of these presented various degrees of difficulty for the Goat A3000 Pro.

Credit: Jacob Hudson / How-To Geek

The Goat can turn on a dime, but it’s still a box shape, so depending on the curves it has to tackle, it can’t always get flush up against the boundary. Because my cutting area had a lot of curves up against walls, the trimmer wasn’t able to get right up against several parts of it. The Goat also has really nice wheels, with gripping spikes that allow it to navigate a lot of rough terrain. Most of the time, it can work itself out of a tight spot. But for my lawn in particular, there was one fairly deep hole that the Goat consistently got stuck in. My fault for not filling that, I suppose.

If your grass is too tall, it just won’t cut

Finally, there’s the tall grass. In the ECOVACS app, you can set the height of obstacles for the lawnmower to avoid while working. This is nifty, but there is one shortcoming; there is no “unlimited” choice. You have to select an obstacle avoidance height, and the highest one is 7.9 inches. In that mode, the Goat will not proceed over any object taller than that, and will instead go around it. This is useful for dodging posts, flagpoles, mailboxes, and the like, but it becomes annoying when your grass is too tall. I was pretty sure my grass was not taller than 7.9 inches, but the Goat seemed to think so, meaning there were several tufts of grass it just refused to cut. I feel like this could easily be avoided if there were an option to have no height limit on obstacles.

The good news is, the Goat has a manual mode you can use with the app. So you can confront these issues by manually controlling the machine and cutting where and what you want if it happens to miss anything. Unfortunately, even though there is a camera mode that lets you see what the robot sees, you can’t actually use this camera while in manual mode, so you have to physically be near the Goat to see what you’re doing.

I can definitely tell it’s better-suited to suburban lawns that already aren’t that difficult to maintain. Especially considering a few other details.

Everything revolves around the base station

Most smart robots, even the humanoid ones we might see in the future, use a base station to recharge and serve as a starting point for all of their operations. This isn’t unexpected, but the way it works with the Goat A3000 Pro is a little annoying. First, if you want to launch any automatic operations, the Goat must start from the base station. Otherwise, it will not work. I used manual mode to drive the Goat just twenty feet away from the base station, still within the very lawn it would normally cut, and it was not able to start an automatic operation even from that short distance. I had to return it to the base station.

That was a problem for me because I have a second area of grass that’s not connected to the first one, and it’s pretty far away. I couldn’t just manually drive the Goat over to the second area, map that zone out, and tell it to cut there. You can only have one map, and you have to divide it into zones if you want to make the Goat cut different areas. So if you have a second area of grass, say, around a mailbox down the road leading to your secluded house, you’d have to physically carry or drive the Goat to that zone and use manual mode to cut it.

There are some concerns about potential theft

That’s not the only concern I have with the base station, either. It works fine, but if I did live in a suburban environment, I’d have some concerns about theft. The unfortunate reality is that this product is not very theft-proof. Yes, you lock it with a number PIN, and yes, the Goat itself has an alarm mode you can set so it will blare an alarm if it is lifted off the ground.

Credit: Jacob Hudson / How-To Geek

But this only stops a thief from using it after it is stolen. It doesn’t actually stop them from taking it. The base station isn’t that secure either; you’re supposed to screw it into the ground with some long screws that use a hex wrench. But hex wrenches aren’t that hard to come by, so it wouldn’t be difficult for someone to unscrew the base station and take it as well. I’m just saying, this is an expensive piece of hardware that is generally just sitting out on your lawn 24/7. It’s definitely the type of thing that would be targeted for theft. I suppose you could try to keep it in a garage, which you only open when the robot is in use, but still.

Should you buy the ECOVACS Goat A3000 LiDAR Pro?

The answer to this question really depends on how much you hate maintaining your own lawn. I, personally, hate cutting grass myself. But is it worth $2,500 to have a robot do it for me? I don’t know. It would take a long time for the Goat to pay for itself. Hundreds, if not thousands, of lawn mows and trimmings. But that all depends on the size of your lawn. If you have a huge lawn that takes hours to cut, the Goat could probably pay for itself with the time it saves you pretty quickly.

Credit: Jacob Hudson / How-to Geek

Though I’ve pointed out a number of flaws in this review, the Goat A3000 LiDAR Pro is still a solid product. I think it just needs a particular set of circumstances to really shine. It cuts extremely cleanly, it’s very safe, it’s super easy to set up and control, and you can easily customize it to do exactly what you want. If you have a traditional lawn, this thing will absolutely work wonders and do extremely well.

But if you have a more difficult lawn with uneven terrain, big holes, uneven boundaries, and grass that’s regularly too tall for its own good, the ECOVACS Goat A300 LiDAR Pro might not be for you.

7/10

Brand

ECOVACS

Cutting Width

33cm

Dimensions

680*583*336mm

Charging Time

70 Minutes

The ECOVACS Goat A3000 LiDAR Pro is a fully automated AI-powered robot lawnmower with a suite of useful features, including adjustable cut height, mowing speed, direction, modes, and the capability to work on significant slopes. It’s ideal for traditional suburban lawns, capable of cutting large areas of grass in very little time.