Sunseeker Elite X5 Review

Design and features

• Powered third wheel
• Floating cutting deck for even mowing
• Binocular AI-enhanced vision for obstacle avoidance

At £1699, the Sunseeker Elite X5 is a mid-priced robot lawn mower. It’s a bit more expensive than the Segway Navimow i105e, but this model can cut much bigger lawns: handling gardens up to 2000m², this robot can handle quite large outdoor spaces.

The standard version comes with Wi-Fi built-in, but you can upgrade to 4G if you have a garden with patchy coverage, which adds another £179.

This lawn mower uses the GPS-based RTK, which relies on an external antenna that needs to be placed on a pole (or there’s the option to mount the antenna on the wall as well, because it comes with an extra power adaptor), somewhere with clear GPS reception. That’s a bit of extra faff, and there’s a growing number of robots that don’t require this: the Husqvarna Automower Nera 305E can get the GPS correction data using Wi-Fi, while the Eufy Lawnbot E15 ditches GPS and opts for camera-based navigation only.

Still, for larger gardens, it’s not too tricky to find a spot for the receiver, and external receivers provide the most accurate positioning.

The other navigation aids come from 3D binocular cameras mounted on the front of the mower. It uses VSLAM and AI machine learning technology to detect obstacles and route around them. And it should learn how to more effectively mow the lawn after each pass.

Setting the mower up was easy. After plugging in the garage and positioning the antenna in the right place, the app takes you through the rest.

Once connected, the map needs to be built. You can drive the mower around the garden like a remote-control car to set your zones, or let AI take over for you. Defining zones and adding channels was made simple, the controls felt intuitive, and it didn’t feel overly complicated. And the app takes you through the whole process, step by step, and in plain English. 

One of the main features of this mower is its clever floating cutting deck. The deck adjusts itself according to the lawn terrain, which should give an even cut from the three spinning blades underneath.

And you can change the cutting heights from 20mm to 60mm, but it’s not done via the app. Adjusting the blade height is achieved by opening the flap on top of the mower and turning a dial. It means you can’t change heights on the fly or set different zones at different heights, as you can with the Husqvarna Automower Nera 305E.

The placement of the drive wheels at the front of the X5 immediately sets it apart from a lot of other robot mowers. And although there’s only a single wheel found beneath the body, it’s a far cry from the unpowered, shopping trolley-style wheel found on the Eufy E15. This third wheel with its big, chunky rubber tread is fully powered.

Having an extra drive and steer wheel promises to make the mower much more capable over rough terrain, and it can tackle slopes up to 30°.

The app lets you set schedules and mowing speeds, create channels and no go areas, and create up to eight mowing areas. Plus, you can manually mow the lawn by walking behind the X5 with your phone and reach tricky areas or any bits that get missed out.

Performance

• Setup is very straightforward and intuitive
• Good obstacle detection
• It mows pleasing straight lines

To test out the Sunseeker Elite X5, I took it to a reasonable size country garden that featured plenty of slopes, obstacles, and overhanging trees to contend with.

Something I like about using this mower is that it’s refreshingly straightforward. It doesn’t overdo it on the features, and you don’t need to be a tech wizard to make it cut your lawns. One of my favourite features was the automatic lawn scheduling. It can decide when and where and for how long it mows each zone without having to fiddle with times on the app.

Mowing in pleasing straight lines, the rear steering wheel means the X5 can perform neat U turns at the end of a pass. It coped well with undulations and rough bits of terrain like wet paving slabs and gravel too.

Electronic cut height adjustment would have been nice, as would the option to set different cutting heights by zone (something that’s possible with the Husqvarna Automower Nera 305E). What I can say is that the quality of the cut is excellent, with even cutting even on uneven ground. I found that the Elite X5 also cut well to the border, too, using its camera to help recognise the boundary.

One omission was the lack of a live, first-person camera view of the mowing process. This was a real perk of the Eufy E15, whose clever cameras let me keep an eye on the garden in real time. It’s also an easy bit of home security if you can dial in to a live view of your garden from wherever you are.

Navigation and obstacle avoidance, using the cameras, are excellent, and the Elite X5 can spot and skirt around items on the lawn, saving having to tidy before each cut.

Even though you can’t set up tracking without spending more money on a 4G module, the mower has a PIN entered directly into it that is set up right at the beginning. So even if someone does walk off with this mower, they can’t use it.

Should you buy it?