Welcome to the era of peak suburban laziness, where we’ve decided that walking behind a machine for forty minutes a week is a Herculean labor worthy of a $2,000 tech solution. Roborock, the company currently dominating the “scaring your cat with a vacuum” market, has unveiled the RockMow X1 LiDAR. Because apparently, the transition from picking up Cheerios to navigating a dynamic, biological ecosystem is just a matter of adding more sensors.

The headline feature here is the 360-degree 3D scanning using LiDAR and Visual Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (VSLAM). It sounds impressive in a CES press release, but anyone who has ever used a robot vacuum knows that a single stray sock can defeat “advanced navigation.” Now, Roborock wants us to trust those same sensors in the wild. LiDAR is fantastic for mapping static walls, but it’s notoriously sensitive to things like tall weeds, swaying ornamental grasses, and heavy rain. Using LiDAR to map a yard is like bringing a surgical laser to a swamp fight. One muddy lens or a particularly aggressive dandelion and your “autonomous” mower will likely treat a hydrangea bush like a structural pillar and give it a Brazilian wax.

Then we have the “All-Wheel Drive” and the claim that it can handle an 80 percent slope. To be clear, an 80 percent slope is roughly a 39-degree angle. That isn’t a lawn; that’s the side of a mountain. Unless you are currently living in a Bond villain’s lair or a Hobbit hole, your lawn does not require mountain-climbing capabilities. Furthermore, the laws of physics—specifically friction—suggest that a lightweight plastic bot on wet grass at a 39-degree angle is less of a “mower” and more of a “high-speed projectile” heading toward your neighbor’s fence.

The RockMow X1 also boasts the ability to traverse obstacles up to 3.1 inches high. Let’s put that in perspective: 3.1 inches is roughly the height of a standard coffee mug. If your yard contains a single fallen branch from a neighborhood oak tree or a slightly enthusiastic garden hose, this “rugged” explorer is going to stage a digital sit-in and ping your phone until you come rescue it. For a device marketed on autonomy, it seems remarkably susceptible to being defeated by a medium-sized pinecone.

Perhaps the most “innovative” part of the announcement is the regression in efficiency. The RockMow X1 can manage half an acre per day—a significant drop from the 5,000 square meters its predecessor, the Z1, could handle. We are officially paying more for a machine that does less, slower. If you actually have half an acre of grass, this robot will be in a state of perpetual motion, buzzing around your yard 24/7 like a giant, expensive mosquito just to keep up with the growth rate of fescue in the spring.

While Roborock is busy slapping VSLAM on everything, they seem to be ignoring the fundamental truth of the American yard: it is a chaotic mess of shadows, dog toys, and unpredictable terrain. Buying a LiDAR-based mower for a standard suburban lot is the definition of over-engineering a solution for a problem that a $300 gas mower solved in 1950. But hey, at least when it inevitably gets stuck on a pebble, it will have a very high-resolution 3D map of the driveway it can’t reach.