Dyson finally made a better robot, but a worse vacuum

I’m deeply conflicted about the Dyson Spot + Scrub Ai robot vacuum and mop. It’s the company’s best robotic floor cleaner to date, with excellent mopping performance, good navigation and obstacle detection, and a multifunction dock that takes much of the busywork off your hands. But Dyson’s first attempt at a vacuum-and-mop combo is a worse vacuum than its predecessors, and that’s because there’s no Dyson motor in this vacuum.

You read that right. For $1,200, the Spot + Scrub doesn’t get you a Dyson vacuum; instead, you’re getting a third-party motor and brush system. “It’s not one of our V10 motors, it’s one of our partner technologies,” Nathan Lawson McLean, senior design manager at Dyson, told me.

Overall, the robot “merges new and already existing Dyson technologies with other platforms.” Lawson McLean confirmed that the Dyson tech is mostly found in the cyclonic auto-empty dock, the Dyson-designed roller mop system, and the Dyson-developed AI-powered stain-detection feature that gives the device its name. Hence, my conflict: how do I review a Dyson robot vacuum whose vacuum isn’t a Dyson?

The Dyson Spot + Scrub is a robot vacuum that can also mop your floors. It uses a large, self-cleaning roller mop that dispenses 140-degree-fahrenheit heated water as it runs, and sensors tell it to raise the mop while vacuuming carpet. Its vacuum has a claimed 18,000Pa of suction and uses a single rubber/bristle roller brush along with two spider-like side sweepers to capture dirt. There’s a camera on board for AI-powered obstacle detection and stain spotting, along with lidar for navigation.

It comes with Dyson’s first multifunction dock that, in addition to charging the bot, empties its onboard dustbin, cleans its mop, and drains and refills its water tanks. The giant dock is an eyesore, but it works and is a welcome upgrade. The lack of a self-empty feature on Dyson’s last robot vac, the 360 Vis Nav, was a big miss.

Dyson has ditched the D-shape of the Vis Nav and opted for a more standard round look. It has also abandoned its purely camera-based navigation in favor of lidar paired with camera-based AI obstacle recognition. iRobot made the same pivots last year when it began working with a third-party manufacturer to catch up with rapidly evolving competition — a few months before it filed for bankruptcy.

While Dyson isn’t likely to follow Roomba’s financial path, its latest model is clearly an attempt to keep up with the plethora of Chinese manufacturers in this space. The Spot + Scrub has a few signature Dyson features, but it is much more like the competition from Roborock or Ecovacs than any of Dyson’s previous bots. Right down to its motor.

Dyson wouldn’t share which “partner” (original design manufacturer, or ODM) it worked with, but mounting evidence suggests that Dyson built its flagship robot on the bones of Chinese ODM Shenzhen Picea Robotics’ R2 ODM platform. The product shares a lot of DNA with robots that we know were manufactured with Picea. It’s similar under the hood to Anker’s Eufy Omni line and iRobot’s 705 Combo Max, with the wheels, side brushes, and mop all bearing a strong resemblance (see picture).

Of course, there are plenty of Dyson touches. A large air filter takes up much of the robot’s body and is much bigger than those found on competitors. It features the signature green laser of Dyson stick vacs for detecting dirt (which is also present on the latest Shark robot vacuum I reviewed; Shark is a Picea customer). The huge, clear “Cyclonic” dust canister in the dock is all Dyson — complete with Dyson blurple plastic. This is actually the dock’s best feature; not only does it eliminate the need for disposable bags, but the clear exterior makes it easy to see how well the vacuum is doing its job.

Lawson McLean also points to the bot’s 12-point hydration system, which self-cleans the microfiber roller as it mops, as a Dyson feature. This is also found on Dyson’s other wet floor cleaning products, the Clean + Wash and the Pencilwash. However, self-cleaning roller mops aren’t unique to Dyson’s robot mop — Eufy, Ecovacs, Roborock, Dreame, and 3i (Picea’s in-house brand) have similar designs.

A Dyson by any other name

Arguably, Dyson needed to work with an ODM that knows how to make a good robot vacuum that doesn’t get lost and can navigate well. Its previous robovacs were great vacuums, but terrible navigators. Switching from vSLAM camera-based navigation to the more tried-and-tested lidar has definitely improved things. Buying the tech from elsewhere rather than spending time developing it themselves was also the right move (if Dyson wanted to get a new vacuum out this decade), and working with ODMs is common in the industry. But a vacuum company putting someone else’s less powerful vacuum in their flagship robot floor cleaner feels like the wrong compromise.

Overall, the vacuum is fine, but it’s not great, which you would expect for $1,200. It does a good job on hard floors and low-pile carpets and tackled my dried oatmeal and chocolate powder tests there easily, sucking up most of them on the first pass. And while its 18,000Pa suction is impressive, combined with the generic brush design, which I’ve seen on dozens of lower-priced robots, it’s just not as good as the Vis Nav.

This was most evident on carpet. The Spot + Scrub really struggled on my high-pile living room rug, leaving almost all the dried oatmeal in my test. That’s disappointing compared to the Vis Nav, which has significantly more power and is one of the best robot vacuums I’ve tested for cleaning carpet.

Instead of the long, fluffy brush of the Vis Nav that reaches along the edges, the Spot + Scrub has a small, single rubber/bristle hybrid brush in the center of the bot and two spider-like side brushes to divert dirt toward the brush. This design abandons everything that was good about the Vis Nav. When I asked Lawson McLean about the change, he said the bristle fibers help agitate the dirt better so it can be picked up by the vacuum. That’s true to some extent on hard floors, but in my years of testing robot vacs, it’s clear that these bristle brushes don’t work well on thicker carpet. They’re also much more prone to tangling. The brush was full of hair after just a few runs.

But the Spot + Scrub is a mopping robot at heart, and its long, blue microfiber roller mop, which extends 1.6 inches beyond the robot to clean along edges, does a good job of keeping hard floors clean. The robot also kept the mop clean during a job, and the dock washed and dried it reliably, if loudly and over a long time. However, in my two weeks of testing, I’ve yet to see noticeable benefit from the flagship AI stain-detection feature, which is purportedly capable of identifying stains and adapting its cleaning accordingly.

The Spot + Scrub didn’t appear to treat the stains I put in its path differently from the rest of the floor, and in a couple of cases involving strawberry jam, it actively avoided them. (Lawson McLean said Dyson is working on improving the vacuum’s approach to “paste-like” objects; currently, it avoids them so as not to get the side brushes gloopy.) The dried milk I left for it didn’t get any special treatment — despite leaving residue after its first pass, it didn’t turn around to check on it and fully clean the spot as it is supposed to. The robot does generate a “Clean Map” in the MyDyson app after every session, showing where it spotted stains, and it didn’t “see” the milk. I also tried testing it with darker stains, like soy sauce, and had the same results.

Lawson McLean says Dyson is working on this: “We have a whole roadmap of over-the-air update improvements, including behavior adjustments that adjust how it cleans,” he said, adding they should be coming this summer.

One area where the Spot + Scrub excels is AI-powered navigation and obstacle detection, which are light-years ahead of the Vis Nav. It moved around obstacles like shoes, socks, and cables nimbly, and navigated between table legs and over small transitions very well. It rarely got stuck. That’s impressive for a bot this big.

But its size and bulk did mean it couldn’t get everywhere I wanted it to. While it fits under semi-low furniture (there’s no lidar tower on top; instead, lidar is built into the front of the robot), it is too wide to fit between the legs of the stools at my kitchen counter and struggles mightily to cross my thick pile living room rug. It’s also unbearably loud when trying to heave itself up onto the rug. To its credit, it eventually did, but only while making the most obnoxious robotic grunting sound.

The other problem I found with the Spot + Scrub is that, while the mop stayed spotless, the rest of the bot got gross quickly. The brush area was sticky and icky after a few runs, and the base station was littered with dirt and debris that fell out of the robot when it docked and undocked, which is, again, a loud and laborious process.

While the Dyson Spot + Scrub does some things well, it doesn’t deliver on everything it promises. If you have a home full of hard floors and a few low-pile rugs, you’ll be happy (as long as you can find somewhere to hide the dock). But for other setups, there are better solutions.

The Matic and Roborock’s Saros 10 are my current top picks in this price range for excellent all-rounders. A more direct competitor as a mopping bot is the Roborock Qrevo Curv 2 Flow. At $1,000 (often on sale for $850), it’s cheaper and has a similar roller mop setup, along with a better vacuum/brush system. Its 20,000 Pa suction and duo divide brush system demolished my carpet oatmeal tests and didn’t get tangled.

The Qrevo also has a nicer-looking dock, but the vacuum itself is not as nimble as the Spot + Scrub and is more prone to getting stuck. If you’re mainly looking for a good vacuum and the mopping portion is of less importance, there are good, cheaper options with similar suction power and better brushes, including the Roborock Qrevo S Pro and Dreame L40S Ultra, both around $700.

If Dyson had been able to combine the power of the Vis Nav with the intelligence and mopping prowess of the Spot + Scrub, this could have been a great robot. Dyson’s engineering and motor power are its strengths, and sadly, they’re lacking here. Instead, Dyson outsourced this core feature to an ODM, resulting in a middling vacuum with a high-end mop and navigation.

Photos and video by Jennifer Pattison Tuohy / The Verge