Slope mowers

By the BackyardRated Editorial Team
Published July 29, 2026 and updated August 28, 2026

Affiliate links. We may earn a commission through MaxBounty if you buy, at no extra cost to you, and it never decides a ranking or a verdict. Full disclosure.

The three classes, and what each one is actually for

Remote control mowers

The operator stands on level ground and drives the machine up the bank with a handset. Nothing about it is autonomous, there is no boundary wire, no app and no mapping, and you are working the whole time it is working.

What you buy is the removal of your own body from the slope, plus enough torque and deck strength to go through growth a lawn machine would stall in. This is the class we cover, because it is the only one we can send a reader to and say so plainly.

If you have already decided the ground needs one and the question is which, the best remote control lawn mowers ranks the four variants by the job rather than by the grade, and sets out the commercial class above them.

Walk behind and self propelled brush mowers

The DR Power class of machine, pushed or self propelled, with the operator uphill of it. They are cheaper, they are proven, and on a slope they put you on the slope, which is the exact thing the remote control class is sold to avoid.

If your ground is rough but walkable and your budget is a third of what is on this page, this is an honest answer and we earn nothing telling you so.

There is a remote control version of this work as well, and it is a different market again: remote control brush mowers, brush hogs and brush cutters are rated in inches of stem diameter rather than inches of grass, they weigh from one to three tons, and none of them is a machine this site can sell you.

Tracked machines

Crawler tracks spread weight and grip better than tyres on loose or wet ground, which is why the steepest professional machines in Europe are tracked. We have no tracked machine to offer you: we read the whole of the range we can link to, forty three products, and every machine in it runs on wheels.

That is a limit of what we sell, not a verdict on tracks, and it is worth saying out loud on the page rather than quietly omitting the class.

Percent grade and degrees are two different numbers

This is the single most useful thing on the page, and it is where most slope shopping goes wrong. Percent grade is rise divided by run times one hundred. Degrees measure the angle.

A slope that rises one foot for every foot it runs forward is a 100 percent grade and also 45 degrees, so percent figures are always the bigger, more dramatic looking number. Manufacturers quote whichever suits them, and comparing a machine's percent rating against a rival's degree rating produces a conclusion that is simply arithmetic error.

Two things follow from that table. The first is that the brand's own pairings are internally consistent: every percent figure it publishes converts to the degree figure printed beside it, which is a small credibility point worth granting.

The second is that the gap between OSHA's riding mower guidance and the entry machine here is already large. You do not need the top of the range to be past the point where sitting on the mower stopped being sensible.

Where a riding mower stops, and what to do about it

The safety case is the honest entry point to this category and it deserves its own page rather than a paragraph. OSHA's guidance also says to mow slopes up and down rather than side to side, and to keep the drive wheels five feet clear of the unprotected edge of a ditch, wall or embankment, which rules out more ground than the angle limit alone does.

What to use on a steep hill works through how to measure your own slope, what the guidance means for a bank you have been mowing for years, and which of the answers costs nothing.

The remote control machines we can point you at

These are the four slope rated variants of one machine, the Mowrator S1, listed in order of the grade the manufacturer rates them to.

It is one brand rather than a market survey, and that is a real limitation of this page: it is the only remote control mower we hold an affiliate relationship with, and there are others in the category, including Spider, RC Mowers and Gravely's remote line, that we have no arrangement with and therefore cannot send you to.

What follows is what each variant is for and where each one is weak.

Every variant shares the same drawbacks, so read these once rather than four times. You drive it for the entire session, and you keep a finger on the blade button the whole time, which owners describe as genuinely tiring on a long cut. It is over a hundred pounds and needs two people to fit the wheels at setup.

The handset is the quiet limitation nobody advertises: one owner reports losing the signal at about fifty feet from the machine, which on a wide property means walking along with it rather than watching from the porch.

Mowrator rates the remote at up to 400 metres, about 1300 feet, and says the working distance is a setting that can be raised, with 100 metres treated as enough for safety and line of sight. So check that setting before you assume the fifty feet is what you are buying.

And the obstacle sensors that make it safe are the same sensors that stop it in deep growth, because tall grass reads to them as a wall. Two separate owners, on the brand's own store and on Trustpilot, describe switching the collision sensors off to get through heavy grass at all. That is the machine working as designed and it is still a real cost to the way you work.

The independent record behind the brand is thin, and we would rather show you the shape of it than imply more. PCMag is the one mainstream test publication to have reviewed the line: it rated the S1 4WD 4.0, and in its robot mower roundup, updated 27 August 2026, calls it the best remote controlled lawn mower.

The hills pick in that same roundup goes to an autonomous machine, the Mova Lidax Ultra 3000.

It also measured the one specification that separates this class from a robot, a 21 inch cutting width against 8.7 inches on the Husqvarna Automower 435X AWD, and called it the widest it had tested.

Trustpilot showed 4.4 out of 5 across 20 reviews when we read it on 28 August 2026, up from 17 reviews at the same score in July, which is still a very small sample. The brand did win an iF Design Award in 2025 for the S1 4WD, though that is an award for design rather than a test of whether the machine cuts.

One thing to know about the star ratings on the brand's own product pages: the review widget on a variant page pools the whole store, so a page for a machine with a handful of reviews of its own can display a total in the hundreds. The figures on our cards are the per product ones.

Affiliate links. We may earn a commission through MaxBounty if you buy, at no extra cost to you, and it never decides a ranking or a verdict. Full disclosure.

The bottom line

Buy the S1 4WD rated to 75 percent unless something rules it out. It is the cheapest variant with four wheel drive, and the only one anybody outside the company has tested.

Take the 2WD rated to 45 percent if the bank is firm and dry and budget decides, the grip tread edition rated to 119 percent if the ground is genuinely that steep and rough, and the wide wheel edition rated to 85 percent only if your problem is soft ground rather than angle.

Whichever you pick, read the return and warranty terms below before you order rather than after. They are the part of this purchase that costs real money when it goes wrong.

When an autonomous robot mower is the better buy

It is worth being blunt about this, because the easy version of this page would tell you that robots cannot climb and that is not true.

Mammotion's LUBA 2 AWD is rated on its own product page to an 80 percent slope, it is genuinely autonomous, and its entry model was listed on that same store at around $2,600 when we checked in July 2026.

That is a steeper rating than the entry and standard variants above, from a machine that mows while you are indoors, for less than either of the four wheel drive machines on this page.

The line between the two is not steepness, it is the kind of work, and the specification that shows it is not the slope figure but the deck. These machines cut a 21 inch swath with a single steel blade.

The Husqvarna PCMag measured it against cuts 8.7 inches with a small rotating disc, and the autonomous class is built that way on purpose: a light body, low clearance and razor style blades are what you want for taking an inch off a kept lawn twice a week.

Put that machine into a rutted ditch full of two foot weeds and hidden branches and the design works against it.

An autonomous mower keeps an already maintained lawn short while you are elsewhere; it is a trimming schedule, not a clearing machine. A remote control mower is for growth that has got away from you, for rough ground with obstacles in it, and for the sessions where you want torque and a steel deck rather than unattended convenience.

If your bank is a mown bank and you want it to stay mown, the robot is the better answer and it earns us nothing to say so. The buying guide for remote control mowers works through that distinction properly, including why the category stayed obscure in the United States.

What it costs after the purchase

The machine price is not the ownership cost, and the gap here is wider than in most categories. On the dearer machines a spare battery alone is a third of what the mower itself cost.

Whichever wheels you buy, they carry only a thirty day warranty of their own.

The main warranty runs two years or two thousand hours on the machine, the remote and the battery, whichever comes first, while consumable parts, which the warranty page lists as blades, bumpers, tyres and springs, are covered for thirty days.

The genuinely good news in that list is that the parts exist as parts. We went through the manufacturer's own catalogue and blades, tyres, hubcaps, the mulch insert, the grass bag, the charger and even the screw pack are all sold separately, with blades starting under a hundred dollars.

A machine you can keep running with published parts is worth more than one you cannot, and this is the part of the ownership story that goes the buyer's way. The brand also lists repair locations in California and Missouri plus dealer service partners in other states, which is more than most direct to consumer hardware offers.

Owner reports do describe blade and fan adapter plates cracking on rock strikes, and that particular plate is not one of the parts on the published list. If your ground has stone in it, budget for that rather than assuming it away.

One upgrade is worth a warning, because it is the one owners reach for first. The high lift blade is sold as the fix for thick growth and it does cut better, but an owner who fitted one reports the machine overheating on heavy foliage and needing to stand and cool down.

That is on the reasoning that the blade now feeds the motor more than it was sized for. More cutting power through the same motor and the same battery is not free.

Five terms in the fine print, before you buy

1. What a return costs after it ships is no longer published. The policy we re-read on 27 August 2026 charges return shipping on returns made for customer reasons and names no fee. On a machine over a hundred pounds that is not a small number, and the return also requires a demonstration video plus photographs of the cleaned inner packaging and the sealed outer box.

2. Thirty days is not the same as no questions asked. The return has to be evidenced before it is accepted: one video demonstrating that the machine does not meet expectations, one photograph of the cleaned inner packaging and one of the sealed outer box. A change of mind still has to be shown rather than simply declared.

   The brand's FAQ adds a term the policy page leaves out. Re-read on 27 August 2026, it asks you to pack the machine back to its original size to avoid overweight fees on top of the return shipping. That shipping figure is published nowhere, so ask support to confirm your return cost in writing before you order.

3. Film the unboxing before you open the box. The warranty page requires an unedited unboxing video recorded before opening for free replacement of missing or damaged items, gives you seven days from signing for the goods to report damage, and asks for logistics damage to be reported within twenty four hours. Miss the video and a missing part becomes your problem.

4. Using it to earn money takes it outside the two year warranty. The warranty table has two columns. The consumer one is the two years or two thousand hours quoted everywhere.

   The other column covers any commercial, professional agricultural, institutional or income generating use, and against every line in it the table says the terms are per specific contract rather than giving a period at all. If you mow other people's ground for payment, the cover you have read about is not the cover you would have.

5. Where you buy it decides whether it is covered. The same page states that machines bought through unauthorised channels are not eligible for free warranty repair, and dates that policy to March 2024.

   This matters more than it sounds, because this machine is also sold through third party retailers. If you buy it somewhere other than the manufacturer, confirm first that the seller is an authorised channel, and keep the invoice, because the warranty requires proof of purchase before any service at all.

Frequently asked questions