I picked up a Honda snowblower for my dad's house this past winter. He shares a non-maintained road with his neighbors, and for the past few years I've helped them with shoveling. Dad always tried to do his part with clearing the snow, but wasn't able to shovel this year, so he opened his wallet.

In February I got a call from the snowblower shop that their first shipment of wheeled snowblowers had arrived. If I wanted to wait they were supposed to be getting a shipment with tracks. I measured the percent grade of our driveways and roads and decided we needed the tracked version.

Our snowblower arrived two days before a pair of back-to-back storms that dumped almost 2 feet of wet, heavy snow. It's a game changer. I asked the one neighbor, who'd said previously "the only snowblower I'd buy is a Honda" [1], what he thought as he was plodding along behind the new snowblower : "You didn't cheap out, and it's the right tool for the job."

The other neighbor was out shoveling around their car, to hopefully be able to get out for her daughter-in-law's surgery. We blasted through the steep part of her driveway. I got a text message that night: 'where did you get that thing?'

The advantage of Honda's tracked snowblower over their wheeled version is that there's a lever-operated piston that adjusts the height, while the wheeled version has no adjustment.

Over those two storms, we probably would have spent at least 12 hours shoveling (breaks included). The snowblower cleared the road in an hour.

As someone says below, it's important to drain the gasoline at the end of the winter, so it doesn't gum up over the summer. Even if there was a battery-powered two-stage snowblower, why would anyone get one? It'd be a waste of lithium.

Edit: When my mom & her husband moved to Flagstaff, their first two-stage snowblower was whatever Costco had for sale that winter. It worked for a few years, then threw a rod through the block on a particularly heavy storm. He returned the unit to Costco, read up on snowblowers, bought himself a big Ariens, and was completely happy with it.

His Ariens used a motor from Tecumseh. Tecumseh went bankrupt around 2008 and got split up [2]. Somewhere I read that Tecumseh's engine manufacturing was relocated to China, and that all the post-2009 Ariens use Chinese engines. Someone said the Chinese Tecumseh engines aren't so bad, because they got all the IP about how to make them properly. Or maybe Tecumseh's engine design was obsolete, needed to be redesigned to comply with emission regulations, and the new Chinese Tecumseh engines are better. ???

Harbor Freight sells knock-off Honda engines, as their Predator engines. There are some youtube videos that compare genuine Honda engines to the knock-offs.

Edit2: Found some forum posts that tells of how Honda's approach to manufacturing engines has changed over the years [3].

[1] https://powerequipment.honda.com/snowblowers / https://www.reddit.com/r/HondaSnowblowers/

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tecumseh_Products#Gasoline_eng... / https://www.snowblowerforum.com/threads/made-in-the-usa-vers...

[3] https://www.snowblowerforum.com/posts/1733694/ / https://www.snowblowerforum.com/posts/1733738/