Let me preface this: what follows is my own personal rant about the absolute frustration I’ve been living with this machine. But the goal here is simple. I need every single one of you to pile on. We have to get the attention of Yarbo ownership. Right now, it’s painfully obvious they either don’t care, have no earthly idea what they are doing, or have completely given up on supporting their existing customers.
I know some of you won’t respond because you are worried about your forum ranking, you’re a beta tester, or you have some other reason to keep quiet. That’s fine. Sit back, sip your coffee, and watch what you know to be true unfold.
And let me add one more caveat. There is always a vocal handful of people on here with a yard or a driveway the size of a postage stamp. Of course you don’t experience most of these bugs. The machine is almost larger than your entire yard anyway. This thread is meant for those of us actually pushing this thing across 10 acres to do real work and use all of its features, not the guy who has a 10-by-10 patch of grass and a driveway that barely fits a single car.
One final point before I let loose: I have said in umpteen of these posts that I desperately want this company to succeed. I have even offered my own software engineering and leadership experience as a corporate technology executive and CIO for major public companies, entirely free of charge, just to try and help this organization get its act together. Predictably, that has fallen on completely deaf ears. Yarbo Ownership, you could crush the market, what are you doing?!
Let’s take a stroll down memory lane from just a month or two ago. A few firmware updates ago, I started a thread about Yarbo blatantly ignoring no-go zones. Many of you chimed in to share that your Yarbo was also treating boundaries like a mere suggestion. It was blasting through no-go zones like an open border. I don’t know how many of you ended up with genuine property damage like I did, but it was a disaster.
Fast forward to last week. I woke up to find my unit had suffered a right track motor failure. It took multiple phone calls and heated arguments just to finally get a replacement track shipped. I spent an hour yesterday playing mechanic to replace it, and while I guess I should count my lucky stars that the thing is actually moving, it now sounds like a dying banshee performing a “death curl” every time it goes in reverse.
Then, the latest software update dropped.
The Firmware Time Machine
It’s like we just reverted to a year ago. When my Yarbo leaves its docking station and travels down an asphalt driveway, it is genuinely terrified of the pavement. Once it hits the lawn, it starts hallucinating fictitious objects in the middle of a perfectly flat expanse of 4-inch-thick green grass with absolutely nothing within 100 feet.
Oh, and the GPS issues are back with a vengeance. After months of stability, this update has caused the unit to stop dead in its tracks at least a dozen times in 45 minutes, claiming it has no GPS signal. It just sits in the exact same spot, pondering its existence, while the GPS quality wildly fluctuates from 0.1 to 0.9.
The Customer Support Asylum
Every single ticket is met with a brick wall of corporate amnesia. Despite having dozens of open tickets with this organization, I am continuously interrogated for:
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Shipping addresses
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Serial numbers
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Order numbers
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Log Screens (we covered this before, you delete your logs anyways)
And my personal favorite: “We need videos and pictures.” Pictures of what, exactly? Do they not know what their own product looks like? What profound diagnostic insight will they glean from a photo of a Yarbo sitting perfectly still on a lawn? I have sent this company more photos of my property in the last nine months than I have in my personal family albums.
The Reality Check
Who is actually running this asylum? Is there a single, grounded adult with actual authority at this company addressing our never-ending problems, or is this just an elaborate cash grab? I’d say it can’t be a cash grab because the unit did work fairly well for a few months, if you ignore the software updates.
I can even excuse the occasional random hardware failure, but let’s look at the scorecard. I spent $9,000, and in less than a year I have had to replace:
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The snowblower head
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The right track
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The battery (three or four times)
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The antennas (halo and gps, three times)
Sure, all of that replacement stuff was technically covered under warranty, and I suppose that’s “nice.” But let’s talk about what that warranty actually costs in human toll. Every single one of those engagements dragged on for weeks. It was a blood-pressure-spiking marathon of non-stop arguments and pure frustration. The lunatics inside the support asylum don’t just fail to help. They treat us with utter contempt at every conceivable turn. I am sick of being told the “higher authority has been informed”. Who the hell is that person?
Am I the only one who thinks there is a massive quality control crisis spanning both their manufacturing and their software development? Can we get a real answer?
Setting all of that aside, it is time we as customers demand answers from someone who holds actual responsibility and understands the culture and expectations of their primary customer base. Whether you are here in the States or one of the three people who bought this in Azerbaijan (no offense to you three, I’m sure you want the same reliability), we deserve better.
I am sick to my stomach of seeing their Ministry of Propaganda post videos of the Yarbo driving around perfectly in front of their office every time I have to go beg for support. Their propaganda engine can go peddle its fiction somewhere else. If this isn’t fixed, maybe we need to organize a group to flood the comments of every single one of their public presentations to warn any conceivable customer about the nightmare they are about to enter into.
Enough is Enough.
We need to rally behind this thread and demand a unified response. In a single forum, we require:
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Direct Answers to the ongoing systemic failures.
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A Firm Timeline for fixes.
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Concrete Actions currently being taken.
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Clear Steps to permanently resolve the software bugs, hardware fragility, and abysmal customer service loop.
At this point, I’m not sure I can point to a single thing this company does well, other than running Kickstarter campaigns and marketing a fantasy.
… I don’t have a large yard or a very complicate layout However… I am absolutely sick at tired of every single firmware update F up… I invested through the kickstarter and have had my unit for 2 years… I was lucky by denying accepting the original shipping and told them I’d wait till the following spring… That led me into the free Core version.