Segway's mowers dropped the antenna at both ends of the price list — for two different reasons

For a decade the selling point of a robotic lawn mower was that it needed no buried boundary wire. The unspoken price of that promise was a second installation job: a satellite reference antenna on a mast, with a clear view of the sky, cabled to the dock. Segway built its Navimow line on exactly that arrangement, and its accessory shelf still sells antenna extension cables, mounting kits and signal-boosting antennas for the older machines. In 2026 the antenna disappeared from both ends of Segway's own range — and the company solved the same problem twice, in two entirely different ways. At the bottom sits the Navimow i2 LiDAR, listed in the manufacturer's European store on 3 February 2026 from EUR 1,199. It has no satellite positioning at all. A lidar paired with a camera maps the garden and locates the machine inside it from the shape of the terrain, which is why Segway can promise that it keeps mowing under trees and at night — the conditions in which a satellite fix degrades. The machine is modest elsewhere: one cutting disc with six blades on a 100 W peak motor, 0.5 m/s, slopes to 45 percent, 59 dB(A). At the top sits the Navimow X4, listed on 16 March 2026 from EUR 2,499. It keeps satellite positioning — tri-frequency RTK, paired with a 360-degree vision system — but takes the correction signal from a network RTK service over a built-in cellular link instead of a mast in the garden. Segway states that both the service and the mobile data are included at no extra cost, and lets buyers check coverage by postcode before ordering. The rest of the machine is built for ground that stops other mowers: four-wheel drive with dual suspension, 7 cm steps, slopes to 84 percent, two 180 W motors driving a 430 mm dual-disc deck, and a 224 W charger that refills the battery in about 75 minutes. The comparison worth making is against what is already in this catalogue. Husqvarna, which created this product category in 1995, charges roughly USD 2,000 extra to move a buyer from its wire-guided Automower to the satellite-guided version of the same machine. Ecovacs answered with lidar in the GOAT A3000 at a list price around USD 3,000. Segway has now put the antenna-free promise into a EUR 1,199 machine — and the two routes it took are not interchangeable. Lidar makes the mower independent of the sky but tied to a garden whose shape it can read. Network RTK keeps centimetre accuracy across open ground but moves the risk of a bad signal from the owner's mast to a mobile operator's coverage map. One caveat on the numbers: Segway's European pages publish no mass, no dimensions and no battery capacity for either model, and no cutting width for the i2 LiDAR. Both profiles in this catalogue say so rather than borrowing figures from neighbouring models.