Before we get into MyRIDE which is an exclusive feature to Toro, lets first talk about how most of the industry addresses comfort. That would be with a suspension seat, which basically means a fancy seat with springs in it to help dampen the bumps. Some suspension seats are more comfortable than others but all of them are a seat alone, not a suspended operator platform like MyRIDE. Typically you don't see suspension seats on homeowner grade machines because consumer mowers tend to be kind of small and suspension seats tend to be kind of big and often don't fit real well on a machine that wasn't designed for one.
What is MyRIDE?
MyRIDE is an operator suspension platform first released by TORO in 2015. It was developed to address the common complaint that zero turn mowers ride rough. This is because zero turn mowers mowers travel twice or more times as fast as typical front engine riding mowers. Just like traveling across a speed bump or a pothole in a car, the faster you travel the greater the shock. It is not uncommon for new Z owners to say their yard seemed smooth with their previous riding tractor mower but now it seems very rough with a zero turn. MyRIDE delivers game changing smooth comfort.
Is MyRIDE intended for Commercial machines?
MyRIDE is offered across the board on nearly all Toro models from our lighter homeowner to our heavier commercial models. MyRIDE is offered on the TimeCutter, TimeCutter Max, Titan, Z-Master 2000, Z-Master 4000 and more.
Take Online Opinions with a Grain of Salt:
Online reviews of MyRIDE tend to be mixed and either very positive or very negative. This is not unusual for exclusive features, because the owners and fans of the other 40 brands of zero turns don't like to think or admit that there is something better than what they have. We're not suggesting that you ignore online opinions, but we do encourage you to give more weight to reviews from those who own or have operated a machine with MyRIDE vs those who once sat down on a parked MyRIDE machine in a store.
Showroom Impressions vs Real Usage:
In store on a parked machine, a common suspension seat appears to offer more absorption than MyRIDE, because you can use your feet and legs to raise yourself up and down to feel the vertical travel offered by the seat. With MyRIDE your feet and legs are on the suspended platform, making it difficult to feel any vertical travel. To try to get some motion out of it, people often rock their body forward and backward, and may end up getting the impression that the purpose of the MyRIDE design is to let the operator rock a little bit forward and backward. Among those who have operated a MyRIDE machine in the field, it is overwhelmingly liked and thought to be the best ride system available.
Competing Ride Comfort Systems:
Some systems on the market try to suspend the whole body of the machine like a car suspension. This allows the body of the machine to lunge down closer to the ground and rise higher above the ground during its cycle of absorbing the terrain. As you can imagine, this creates a cut quality problem because we don't want the deck lunging down at the ground every time we hit a bump. This leads to a complex system to raise the deck as the body lunges. Or in some cases on lesser expensive models, they just put some springs in places that do virtually nothing but look cool and help sell the mower. TORO's MyRIDE is much simpler, it suspends the driver, not the whole machine, a similar strategy to that used on a long-haul tractor-trailer rig.
Sounds Like More Complication and More to Go Wrong
MyRIDE does not require maintenance. At the time of this writing, 10 years since the release of MyRIDE, we have sold over a thousand machines with the MyRIDE feature at our dealership and have yet to replace anything worn out or broken on a customers machine that had anything to do with the MyRIDE system. We can't say the same about suspension seats where the mechanism sometimes wears out.
