A Toro from the '90s makes way for its successor
This week we delivered a new Toro eS3000SD to a customer in Huldenberg. Nothing special, you might think, were it not for the fact that his old Toro was still standing right next to it. Same brand, same red color, but about 30 years older. Seeing those two side by side really made us stop and think.
How Toro Even Got Into Lawn Mowers
Toro was founded on July 10, 1914, in Minneapolis and initially had nothing to do with gardens. The company built engines for The Bull Tractor Company, America’s largest tractor brand at the time. The name "Toro" is simply Spanish for bull, chosen because of that connection with Bull.
When an agricultural crisis in the early 1920s caused the farming market to collapse and Bull Tractor went bankrupt, Toro had a problem. Salvation came from an unexpected source: a golf club in Minneapolis asked whether a motorized machine could take over the horse work on the fairways. The result was a tractor with five reel mowers at the front that could cut a width of 3.5 meters in a single pass. With this, Toro unintentionally laid the foundation for the entire industry of motorized grounds maintenance. Saved from bankruptcy by a golf club, in other words. Sometimes history really is stranger than fiction.
In 1948, Toro bought the Milwaukee-based company Whirlwind, a manufacturer of rotary lawn mowers, and improved the design with an enclosed mowing deck. This made the machine safer and more appealing to regular home gardeners. This is how Toro grew from golf course specialist to the brand that eventually ended up in people’s homes—including our customer in Huldenberg, somewhere in the 1990s.
What we do it for
The customer later called us again with the following message:
What has changed in 30 years
The old machine ran on gasoline. Replacing spark plugs, changing oil, checking the belt—every season the same ritual. Not a bad machine, since it lasted three decades. But the new generation simply works differently.
The eS3000SD runs entirely on a lithium-ion battery. No combustion engine, so no emissions, no smell of gasoline, and no annual maintenance routine. The battery delivers consistent power from start to finish, without the machine slowing down as the charge drops. The cutting width is 76 cm, the mowing deck is made of steel, and the machine uses Side Discharge so that the grass clippings are spread to the side. And it is noticeably quieter, which really makes a difference for yourself and your neighbors in a residential area.
Feel free to contact our team for more information about Toro. We are happy to assist you!
