Six weeks ago I watched the GOKO M6 drive up a demo slope at the Lawn and Land Equipment Expo and loved it. But I said it at the end of that video and I meant it: I'd seen it work at an expo, I hadn't lived with it. So we asked GOKO, "Can we get it at our house?" Now it's here — at my place on the Gold Coast, on the waterfront, lined up at the bottom of the steepest bank in the yard. Four-wheel drive, two different grasses, a drop-off into the water, and no boundary wire. This is the real test.

Today I'm putting the M6 through what my backyard actually throws at a mower: different levels, thick buffalo grass, a steep bank, a narrow side passage and a drop-off down to the waterway. I'm mapping it, setting it up in the app, watching the cut and the finish, and seeing whether it can dodge an obstacle I put right in its path. One honest thing up front: this is a pre-production prototype, not the final retail machine. Some of the software and connectivity is still being worked on. What I'm judging is how it mows my lawn — the drive, the cut, the slope and the navigation — and I'll tell you where the pre-production side showed.

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01The Test: Four Jobs in One Backyard

Most robot mowers are built for a flat rectangle. My yard isn't one. We're right on the waterway, so there's a drop-off at the bottom of the lawn. There are different levels. There's a steep bank down one side. And there are two different grasses — a thicker grass up top, and down the bottom that really dense buffalo, which was sitting quite long when we started.

Different levels, two grasses, a slope and a drop-off. That's four different jobs in one backyard, and that's exactly why this mower is in mine. Proper four-wheel drive — not two wheels driving and casters getting dragged around — on a block that would beat a normal robot mower inside a week.

02First Impressions: Built Like Proper Kit

Pick it up and you know straight away this isn't a toy. It's 26.5kg on the standard battery and 28.5kg with the twin. It's solid, it's planted, and it feels like proper commercial kit — not a plastic thing that lasts you a season.

And I'll say what I said at the expo: it just looks brilliant. It's got that Tesla thing about it — sleek, low, sharp. It's the best-looking mower I've had on this lawn by a mile. That shouldn't matter, but when it's sitting out in your yard every day, it does. The whole body is IP66 rated, so rain, a hose-down or the sprinkler going off don't bother it, and it's rated to run between 0 and 40°C — which up here matters, because we absolutely get the top end of that.

03Mapping With No Boundary Wire

This is the bit that makes the difference. There's no boundary wire. None. Normally with a robot mower you're on your hands and knees pegging wire around the whole yard before you mow a single blade of grass — around the beds, around the trees, down the side and back up again. A day's work, and it's why most people never bother. With the M6 you walk the boundary once in the app, confirm it, and it's ready.

That's CyberNav Fusion, and it's not just GPS. It's RTK, VSLAM, IMU and wheel odometry all working together, so it holds a dead-straight line and knows exactly where it is. I've got the RTK base station set up at the side of the yard. It'll store a map up to 15 acres (around 60,000m²), split into unlimited zones. And if it loses RTK signal for a bit, it doesn't stop — it keeps mowing on vision for about another 150m (roughly 10 minutes), then locks back on. That's what you want beside the house and under the palms, where the signal's never as clean as the middle of an open lawn.

One thing worth knowing if you're buying: I walked this boundary myself, but GOKO says the final production model will support auto mapping, so you won't have to walk the whole boundary at all.

04Edges & the Waterfront Drop-Off

Because it's wire-free and positioning off that map, the M6 goes right up close to where I set the edge — but not over it. With water at the bottom of the lawn, that's the whole ball game. You can set it and forget it, confident it's going to go exactly where you mapped it.

The M6 is built to get close: there's a tight gap between the disc and the shell, a straddle mode and a 6cm precision cut. But look where I put my boundary — I set it back off the water. There's a drop-off there and I'm not mapping a mower to the very edge of it. Same with the concrete; I don't want it rubbing every pass. That's not the mower, that's me, and anyone with water or a pool would do the same. So I still go around with a trimmer now and then, and that's completely fine.

05App Setup: Height, Path & Angle

Before the first mow, into the mowing settings. You pick your cutting height, mowing speed, path pattern and path angle. I went 1.2 inches, standard speed, parallel paths — and let it go. That's the whole setup: walk around, save the map, pick your height, pick your path, go.

Height runs anywhere from 1 to 4 inches (25–100mm), so you're in control of exactly how you want your lawn. I've got 1.2 because I want it tight right now, but up here in summer I'll leave it longer so it doesn't burn off. You get it both ways, too: there's a 4.3-inch colour screen and a control knob on the mower, so you can change things standing right there without getting your phone out. Everything else — zones, height, path angle, schedule — lives in the app, with a notification after every session.

06Zone Mowing Through the Side Passage

Down the bottom of the hill I set the M6 up with zone mowing. The side section of my yard connects back to the main lawn through a narrow bit, and that's where zones do the work: it gets between the two areas through the tight passage, finishes, and comes back — without me going out to rescue it. With the water drop-off right there, that's exactly where you need the boundaries to be working properly, and they were.

07Cut Quality, Noise & Those Stripes

The first thing you notice standing next to it is how quiet it is. It runs under 60dB — I'm standing right beside it talking to camera while it goes backwards and forwards. And look at the cut. The buffalo down the bottom is really thick, and it's taking it low and consistent across the whole lawn. It really is incredible.

The cutting width is 16.5 inches (420mm), so every pass pulls out a big strip — on a lawn this size, that's the difference between finished and still going at dinner time. Underneath there are twin 250W blade motors on a floating deck that follows the ground: it rolls over a bump and the deck moves with it. That's why the height stays even and you get stripes instead of a patchy finish.

Two blade options, too. Razor discs — two sets of six little blades at 3,000rpm, quiet and fine. Or rotary mulching blades at 5,000rpm, which chop finer and feed it back into the lawn. Changing them over is easy; you pick based on your grass and what you're after. And it holds cutting speed through the thick stuff, because all four wheels are driving it through instead of two wheels slipping.

08The Slope Test: Four-Wheel Drive Up My Bank

This is the whole reason it's in my yard. I've called it a 30° slope — honestly it's hard to measure by eye, it's somewhere in the 25 to 30° range — and the M6 dealt with it so easily. Up, down, across the side incline, through thick grass, no issue at all. Straight back up the hill again, laying down lovely passes the whole way. It was effortless, and still quiet.

GOKO rates it to 40°. Most robot mowers tap out at half that — 20 to 25° and they're done — so my bank sits comfortably inside what this thing is built for, and you can see how unbothered it is. That's proper four-wheel drive with adaptive suspension and dual independent front-wheel steering, gripping on all four corners going up. There's 3 inches of clearance underneath too, so it rides over roots and bumps instead of bailing out.

Watch how it turns, because that's what wrecks a lawn — pivoting on the same patch over and over. The independent front steering walks it through the turn, and when you look at the grass afterwards, it looks absolutely incredible. Every mower can do a flat lawn. Four-wheel drive is what lets it do a real backyard: the slope, the thick stuff, the wet stuff, the lumpy bit down the side. It's the difference between a mower that works at your place and one that sits halfway up the hill flashing an error at you.

09Obstacle Avoidance: The Owl Statue Test

I put a garden statue of an owl right in its path. It stopped, altered course and kept going. That's QuadVision AI — four cameras, a stereo pair at the front and one on each side — and it recognises over 200 object types: people, pets, toys, furniture, the lot. It doesn't stop dead and wait for you, either. It works around it and carries on.

That's the one that matters most to me, because the alternative is a mower that bulldozes straight through your garden edging.

10Connectivity, Theft Protection & Battery

Remember, this is a pre-production unit, so connectivity is where that shows most. The final production model will support 4G, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. For positioning, you choose between GOKO's own network RTK service or an RTK base station, depending on your setup — and that matters, because not everyone's got a clear view of the sky. The final model will also support Google Home and Alexa, so you can start it with your voice.

The theft protection is serious, which you want with something this expensive sitting out on an open lawn: GPS tracking, a geofence and lift alerts. If it gets picked up or leaves your yard, you know straight away.

Battery: a 12Ah lithium-ion as standard, or 24Ah on the twin. That's about 2 hours on one and 4 hours on two. The standard does about half an acre on a charge; the twin does a full acre (around 4,000m²) in one run. Across a day it'll do up to 2 acres, and GOKO recommends it for lawns from a quarter-acre up to 2.5 acres — which covers just about every block most of us are on. Charging from 20 to 80% takes about 45 minutes on the standard and around 90 on the twin. It takes itself back to the dock, charges, goes back out and picks up where it left off.

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▶Watch My GOKO M6 Expo Review

Want to see where this started? Here's my first hands-on with the GOKO M6 from the Lawn and Land Equipment Expo on the Gold Coast, when it launched in Australia:

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