Dyson's new $1,200 Spot + Scrub Ai robot vacuum and mop has arrived, and it's the company's best robotic floor cleaner to date - provided you don't actually need it to vacuum well. The Spot + Scrub excels at mopping, navigation, and obstacle detection, and its multifunction dock handles the boring stuff like emptying and cleaning. But here's the kicker: Dyson's first vacuum-and-mop combo doesn't actually use a Dyson vacuum motor. Instead, it relies on 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 The Verge. So the company that built its reputation on bagless cyclonic suction is now selling a robot whose vacuum part is made by someone else. The Dyson tech lives in the cyclonic auto-empty dock, the roller mop system, and the AI-powered stain-detection feature. The vacuum itself is a guest star.
The Spot + Scrub uses a self-cleaning roller mop that dispenses 140-degree-Fahrenheit heated water and raises the mop on carpet. It claims 18,000Pa of suction and uses a single rubber/bristle roller brush with two side sweepers. A camera and lidar handle navigation and stain spotting. The dock empties the bin, cleans the mop, drains and refills water tanks - and is, in fairness, an eyesore that works. Dyson ditched the D-shaped 360 Vis Nav for a round design and swapped camera-based navigation for lidar with AI obstacle recognition, a move iRobot made before filing for bankruptcy. The Spot + Scrub resembles robots from Roborock or Ecovacs more than any previous Dyson bot, right down to the motor. Dyson won't name the third-party manufacturer, but evidence points to Shenzhen Picea Robotics' R2 platform, which also underpins Anker's Eufy Omni line and iRobot's 705 Combo Max.
Dyson touches include a large air filter, a green laser for dirt detection, and the iconic blurple "Cyclonic" dust canister in the dock. The 12-point hydration system for the mop is also Dyson-designed, though self-cleaning roller mops aren't unique to this robot. Dyson needed an ODM that could make a robot that doesn't get lost - its previous bots were great vacuums but terrible navigators - and switching to lidar helped. But putting someone else's less powerful vacuum in a $1,200 flagship feels like the wrong compromise. The vacuum is fine on hard floors and low-pile carpets, handling dried oatmeal and chocolate powder easily. Its 18,000Pa suction is impressive on paper, but combined with the generic brush design, it's not as good as the Vis Nav. On high-pile carpet, the Spot + Scrub struggled mightily, leaving almost all the dried oatmeal in tests. The small rubber/bristle hybrid brush and two side brushes abandon the Vis Nav's superior edge-cleaning design and are more prone to tangling - the brush was full of hair after a few runs.
As a mopping robot, it's solid: the long blue microfiber roller mop extends 1.6 inches beyond the robot to clean edges, and the dock reliably washes and dries it, albeit loudly and slowly. However, the flagship AI stain-detection feature proved underwhelming in two weeks of testing. It didn't treat stains differently from the rest of the floor, and in some cases - like strawberry jam - it actively avoided them. Lawson McLean said Dyson is working on over-the-air updates to improve behavior, expected this summer. The AI-powered navigation and obstacle detection, however, are light-years ahead of the Vis Nav, nimbly avoiding shoes, socks, and cables and rarely getting stuck. But the robot's bulk means it can't fit between kitchen stool legs and struggles on thick rugs, making obnoxious grunting noises while trying to climb onto them. The brush area got sticky and gross after a few runs, and the base station collected debris that fell out during docking.
For $1,200, the Spot + Scrub doesn't deliver on everything it promises. If your home is all hard floors with low-pile rugs, you might be happy - provided you can hide the dock. Otherwise, better options exist. The Roborock Qrevo Curv 2 Flow, at $1,000 (often $850), offers similar roller mop setup with better vacuum performance, 20,000Pa suction, and a duo divide brush system that demolished carpet oatmeal tests without tangling. The Roborock Qrevo S Pro and Dreame L40S Ultra are around $700 with comparable suction and better brushes. If Dyson had combined the Vis Nav's power with the Spot + Scrub's intelligence and mopping, it could have been great. Instead, they outsourced the core feature, resulting in a middling vacuum with a high-end mop and navigation.