The MOVA V70 Ultra Complete isn't perfect, but it solves one big robot vacuum problem

If you’re not using a robot vacuum yet, you do not know what you’re missing. I first started getting into the tech properly as a reviewer earlier this year, expecting disappointment at every turn, and I could not have been more wrong — these products have years of refinement under their belts, and are effortlessly capable of delivering a really impressive cleaning experience.

But for as good as they are, that refinement has only begun to highlight some of the areas where there’s still clear room for improvement. Yet so often with autonomous devices, that’s exactly where things start going wrong — those problems are left for last for good reason.

This past summer, I heard about the MOVA V70 Ultra Complete ($1299 at Amazon), bragging about its ability to tackle a quite literal edge case — and specifically, a problem that bothered me about the last robot vacuum I looked at: the ability to clean all the way to even hard-to-reach edges. Would it deliver? Let’s take a look.

Sleek, powerful vacuum hardware with a reach like none other

Robot vacuums are 20-some years old at this point, but many still have a common problem: All that cleaning hardware is underneath, so if you can’t get directly on top of something, you can’t clean it. For open floors, that’s not an issue, but it makes edges tricky. Plenty try to mitigate with spinning “whisker” brushes that extend out a bit, but MOVA absolutely takes that to the next level with the V70 Ultra Complete.

As you can see above, both that brush and one of the mop pads are mounted on arms that extend out, away from the robot’s body — up to 6.7 inches out for the mop, or 4.7 inches for the brush. It’s the difference between trying to paint a wall using your chest and holding brushes in your outstretched hands.

Those extending pieces notwithstanding, the rest of the vacuum hardware looks largely familiar. A magnetic top plate pops off to access the internal dust bin and its filter (which you’ll want to keep clean for optimum performance). I was expecting a secondary removable tank for the mop water, but that’s not user accessible. Underneath, we’ve got our main brushes, drive wheels, whisker brush, and the spots where the mop pads go when you’re doing a mopping run — when not needed, they remain behind in the base station.

The dual-brush design performs solidly in my testing — I didn’t encounter any problems with tangles jamming up operation. If you do need to free an obstacle from their grasp, though, the two easily lift out after removing their protective housing, and there’s convenient color coding to let you know exactly how you’re supposed to place them back in.

Great dock design, held back by a few questionable decisions

It’s easy to take vacuum base stations for granted, but this one has a few really nice features. While other mops force you to pre-mix cleaning solution with the clean water tank prior to operation (like you’re mowing the lawn with a 2-stroke that burns oil), the V70 UC offers a much, much more refined solution, utilizing a dedicated soap tank that’s fully separate from your water tanks.

Better still, it’s advanced enough to support two separate cleaning solutions — in addition to your main soap tank, you can also load the unit with a specialized cleaner, like an enzymatic one optimized for pet messes.

The other big base station plus for me here is that the V70 UC doesn’t use a bag-based vacuum emptying system like I’ve seen from some of its competition. Instead of a bag, the V70 UC offloads dirt into a solid-walled dustbin that is easy to remove and empty. It’s got its own cleanable air filter, so you don’t need to buy a new one each time you want to empty it.

I do have two complaints about the base, though — but they may matter a lot less to some of you. Accessing the clean and dirty water tanks is a breeze, with the top of the base station lifting for easy access. But the solution tanks and dust bin live behind a front panel that pops all the way off — and then doesn’t go back on nearly as smoothly as it should, with awkward tabs. For an otherwise really satisfying design, it’s a notable oversight.

The other concerns the bane of my existence with robotic mopping: drying. When your robot is doing its business, actively cleaning the room, you expect a bit of noise — nothing excessive, but vacuums are far from silent. Usually, a base is only making noise over an extended period when it’s drying its mop.

With the V70 UC, though, I’ve found the unit entering a drying mode even after running a vacuum-only session. Worse still, the base station emits a slightly concerning “hot plastic” smell. The app tells me this isn’t mop drying, but tank drying, and so I tolerate it. But it’s still an unexpected distraction that I wish I had more direct control over.

A highly capable cleaning aide

All this hardware sounds pretty solid — so how does it perform at actually keeping your house tidy? The answer there: pretty darn well.  I don’t tend to run the unit at anywhere near full power with all my bare floors, but if you’re dealing with a lot of carpet, the beefy 42,000Pa suction power should come in plenty handy.

I’m mostly concerned with getting good edge-to-edge coverage when it comes to removing dust, and the “MaxiReachX” side brush extension actually seems to deliver. By reaching farther than competing models, the V70 UC can pull in much more dust, and the results are noticeable. That said, there’s still room for improvement, and as you watch the vacuum in action, you can appreciate how the brush’s limited range of motion means it can’t always reach where it’s needed.

For mopping, the V70 UC comes with a pair of rotating pads. This is a tried-and-true solution for robot vacuums, and while I still prefer a roller mop, these absolutely get the job done. They attach magnetically and are automatically left behind at the base station when not needed for vacuum-only tasks.

When you are looking to wash the floor, they’re ready to push down with 15N of pressure to help knock loose stubborn stains, and spin at 300 RPM. It wasn’t a problem in my carpet-free home, but if you’ve got rugs you don’t want to risk getting wet, the mop pads pull up with 10.5mm clearance, to avoid unwanted damp spots.

Again, we’ve got that MaxiReachX tech helping one of the mop pads extend out from the robot body to clean right to the baseboard. This works similarly to the brush extension, but its positioning at the rear of the robot results in a lot more pivoting back and forth as the robot attempts to work it into every last corner.

As I’d only expect, the pads self-clean as needed, and the unit comes with spares, so you easily swap them out when they start getting gross.

Even when turning up the mop water level to higher than normal, I didn’t notice particularly wet floors, and the careful, deliberate application of water means that your floor’s dry just moments after the robot’s pass.

Another nice feature of the V70 UC is its StepMaster System 2.0, which lets the robot scale thresholds and obstacles as high as 4.5cm. This has been a problem for past robot vacuums I’ve worked with, awkwardly trying — and often failing — to climb their way into my bathrooms. This MOVA model has had no such issue and effortlessly manages to navigate where I need it to go.

Familiar-feeling software, but with a few odd quirks

MOVA’s app gets the job done, but in multiple places, it is a bit rougher around the edges than I’d like.

While the basic functions work well enough, mapping is a weak spot, and that’s especially true when it just full-on glitches out at you, which I found occurring far too often. Suddenly, the map would shift halfway across the screen, and the cleaning zone I had just configured was now floating off in space, outside my windows.

There’s a whole lot of functionality here, from tracking the status of all the vacuum’s consumables to letting you configure shortcuts for recurring cleaning tasks to dynamically adjusting multi-room cleaning strategies as needed.

When that works, it works, but there’s still this film of jank over parts of the experience. Beyond those outright glitches I mentioned before, there’s also a bit of a Bizarro vibe I get from some of the decisions MOVA made here — when cleaning up after a mopping task, the robot doesn’t announce that it’s drying its mop pads, and instead tells you it’s “dehydrating” them. Who wants mop-pad jerky?

The UI’s also less than intuitive at times. One feature I’ve loved with other vacuums is the ability to deep clean by repeating the robot’s back-and-forth route at a 90-degree angle. I’m used to finding that on the same screen where you set options like vacuum intensity and the density of those passes, often represented cleanly and graphically. I used the V70 UC for weeks before I realized this unit could do the same thing, just by tapping a “1x” button on the main map view to change it to “2x.”

MOVA V70 Ultra Complete review verdict: Killer performance, needs more premium sheen

The MOVA V70 Ultra Complete leaves me feeling more frustrated than I’d like to be, because this is clearly some very capable hardware, and for the most part, I think it’s executed rather well. The robot is unquestionably good at its job, and cleans up quickly and completely. But this is also a $1,300 solution, and when you’re competing in that premium space, it’s hard to just give the unit a pass when it keeps dropping the ball — even on things that don’t seem that big on their own.

But then I go right from feeling satisfied about a freshly mopped floor to accidentally knocking the front panel off the dock and struggling to get it back on, or to the app relocating a cleaning zone off the map entirely. My main point of comparison recently has been Roborock’s hardware and software, and I just feel like its vacuums are better and more professionally executed on both fronts. For example, the Roborock Qrevo Curv 2 Flow ($999.99 at Amazon) comes in cheaper with all that extra polish, though there is a trade-off in raw power (its 20,000Pa is less than half the V70 UC’s 42,000Pa), and its edge reach doesn’t match the MaxiReachX feature.

Probably the most direct competition for the V70 Ultra Complete in MOVA’s own stable is the Z70 Ultra Roller Complete, which swaps this unit’s dual spinning mop discs for a roller mop. The Z70 similarly has a MaxiReach brush of its own, and the roller mop slides out for better wall coverage. And while I do tend to prefer roller mops, the V70 has the edge here when it comes to raw vacuum performance, with the Z70 only capable of 36,000Pa suction.

Overall, I’m reasonably happy with how the V70 Ultra Complete came together, and can live with its quirks — just maybe not at $1,300. That said, there’s always going to be a price at which little annoyances become easier to swallow, and the V70 UC is already discounted to $1,160 — wait for the right sale, when this is south of a thousand, and I start feeling a lot better about what MOVA’s doing here.