Oso Electric Equipment was established 2 years ago with a simple mission: Electrify Your World. As part of that mission, we focused our aim on electrifying small to medium-sized gasoline engines in various industries. We chose the landscape industry first due to its high impact on greenhouse gas emissions and other pollutants emitted by commercial landscaping equipment. After working with local landscapers to understand the state of battery-powered commercial-grade landscaping equipment in the industry, it quickly became clear that we could also solve another major problem – Put simply, the existing battery-powered commercial landscaping equipment was terrible. We knew we could do better. We decided to tackle the 21-inch walk behind mower due to its widespread use all over the country.
The Oso 21-Inch Commercial Electric Lawn Mower is a 4G LTE connected smart mower that can go head-to-head against the best gas mowers in the market today. In only the short amount of time we have been selling our equipment, we have struggled to keep up with production capacity due to its popularity. Oso customers love our mower because of its ease of use, comparable performance to gas-powered equipment, minimum maintenance, fuel expense savings, and its superior build quality. I do want to personally thank the California Clean Off-Road Equipment Voucher Incentive Project (CORE) for their generous rebate program, which helped Oso tremendously in the early days in convincing customers to try our mower.
Oso Electric Equipment has fully embraced the business principle of the Circular Economy, which simply means we will build our product with high-quality, long-lasting materials with a well-defined end-of-life plan to either refurbish or recycle the product to lower its lifetime emissions impact. To that end, we are willing to buy back our product from our customers. I encourage you to visit osoelectric.com or speak with one of our sales executives for more details on the warranty and buyback program.
We made the Oso mower with ‘smart’ and ‘connected’ features because we wanted to collect detailed product usage information so we could better understand the size of battery, blade performance requirement, and the daily runtime needs of our users. Thanks to our usage data, we can confidently tell you that Oso’s 2-hour battery runtime was a good decision. We recommend our customers buy two batteries for a total of 4 hours of runtime per day. Based on our data, more than 90% of our mowers are used for less than 4 hours of actual cut time, despite being out in the field for a full workday. We have only a single digit percentage of users who regularly use their mowers for more than 4 hours per day. We also learned that our blade and self-drive system is powerful and well-tuned compared to gas mowers, with minimal complaints about the overall performance of the mower.
Looking Ahead to 2024
We were impressed with our product performance in 2023 and are looking forward to 2024. We are excited to expand our market footprint to other states.
I am also excited to announce our latest product for 2024, which is a power bank, Oso Plug2Go™ for on-the-road charging of all your handheld devices. We will have more information on our website soon, but Plug2Go is a Power Bank + Oso 3-Battery Charger, all in one. Since the batteries are external, you can share the batteries between the mower and the power bank. However, we recommend that you get dedicated batteries for the power bank. With a 120V/20A output, 4.8KWh/100Ah capacity, Plug2Go can cover almost all of the mobile charging needs of landscapers. Plug2Go will be available as an add-in product beginning in Q2 2024. Please contact our sales team for additional information.
As part of our mission, we estimated the avoided Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions by using Oso mowers instead of gasoline-powered mowers. These emissions primarily include CO2, Methane, and Nitrous Oxide. Our calculations are based on information from CARB and the EPA for a small off-road vehicle engine. Based on this, we estimated that Oso mowers have avoided about 1,500 metric tons of GHG emissions in 2023. I am incredibly proud of our team and our product for this big milestone in our first year and our impact in the market. I am hoping to avoid tens of thousands of tons of emissions in the coming years.
Lastly, a big shoutout to the Oso Customers who have made this possible. We look forward to an even better 2024.
From the Oso Team to You, Happy Holidays and Feliz Navidad!