When someone shops for a lawnmower, face-melting acceleration isn’t typically very high on their buying criteria. Then again, most people don’t work for Honda UK. The Japanese purveyor of motorized goods has gone mad and fitted a sportbike engine into a lawnmower, breaking a world record for the quickest moving grass-cutter the world has ever seen.
Powered by the 999cc motor from the company’s CBR1000RR Fireblade SP motorcycle, Honda’s Mean Mower V2 gets from zero to 100 miles per hour in precisely 6.29 seconds. Verified by a Guinness World Records adjudicator at Germany’s Lausitzring, it holds the honor of ‘Fastest Acceleration 0-100 mph for a Lawnmower’. That’s faster than the 2019 Acura NSX which, according to Car and Driver, gets to 100 in seven seconds flat, possibly making the Mean Mower V2 the fastest Honda with four wheels this side of one of the firm’s old F1 cars.
The engine in the back of this thing makes 189 horsepower and 85 pound-feet of torque. Weighing around 308 pounds, this piece of lawn equipment boasts a better power-to-weight ratio than the mighty Bugatti Chiron. It observed an average zero to 60 time of 3.26 seconds and topped out at 151 mph.
Piloted by stunt driver and racer Jess Hawkins, Honda’s sophomore Mean Mower was launched twice in opposing directions within an hour to get an average time—similar to that time Koenigsegg sent an Agera RS down a Nevada highway in both directions to prove it was the fastest car in the world. In order for the record to be official, the Fireblade-powered lawnmower also had to ‘intrinsically look like a lawnmower’ and prove that it could actually, y’know, cut grass.
In the interest of journalistic integrity though, we’d like to call on Honda to loan us the Mean Mower for a spot of yardwork, er, independent testing. How does this weekend sound?
