Good. The John Deere monopoly is wild, but if you talk to a farmer they say they can’t handle the repairs. Sure, John Deere gets to make more expensive and complex machines and convince their customers that it’s “the future”.
Wish they sold something in the compact utility segment. 40-60hpish. I'd love an affordable Canadian made tractor for property maintenance / smaller farms.
(Though these days I've love something electric. I don't need long run time, I'm not doing row crops. Just market gardening and property maintenance stuff. All the electric stuff I see out there is aiming up at the high end and for autonomy / "smart" tractor stuff which I don't care about.)
I have a Kubota L3010 HST (late '90s-early '00s) and it's fantastic. Fuel efficient, quiet, comfortable, minimal electronics, pretty easy to work on. It's a little underpowered (30hp/24 pto hp), but not egregiously. It'll run a 9" post auger or chip 6" logs if you feed them slowly enough. I'll have to split it this summer, unfortunately, it's developing a hydraulic leak from the clutch housing which almost certainly means the front driveshaft seal is failing.
This is the way if we can ensure manufacturing of the parts. It won’t catch on but it would be awesome to have “base” tractors that are mechanical and predictable. Then you slap on whatever software on top that helps (automation, etc). But they need to be decoupled imo.
I think this is a reaction to the incredibly locked down ecosystem that most of these mfgs are pushing.
However, the tech exists for a reason and is not inherently bad, the issue is the lock-in, the lack of choice and interoperability.
IMO, there is plenty of space for an OEM who can play nice with others, offer an open (and vibrant ecosystem), and keep users coming back by choice, not by lock-in.
>> However, the tech exists for a reason and is not inherently bad, the issue is the lock-in, the lack of choice and interoperability.
The marketing excuse for the tech might be features or efficiency, but the reason for the tech is lock-in and minimising product lifetime.
The days when manufacturers had friendly, cooperative relationships with their customers are long gone :( Can we bring them back? I hope so, but am not hopeful.
It goes much deeper than that. The John Deere ecosystem is designed to trap farmers using a combination of the closed ecosystem and financing. They've been at it for years, selling precision agriculture advances as the thing that will maximize all yields and turn profits, and then following up with economic manipulations to create what amounts to tech-enabled sharecropping.
I think going bare-metal at cut-rate might've been the only way to actually kick-start that. F.ex. ECU's make things more optimal so buyers will be paying extra for fuel in a bad economy, but the lock-down was worse when it was causing downtime.
But tech in general is perhaps in a growing-up phase, we had Arduinos and Raspberry PI's filling a similar need (computer to electronics being needlessly complicated) that was initially filled from the low-end, but now we have faster SBC's and stuff like Framework laptop's that is expanding the range of options for repariable/replaceable/hackable parts up to the high end today and farming equipment is probably destined to get a similar range of options.
An interesting note here is, will cars also start getting a range of more hackable options, mechanics are ingenious already but it's still very much hacks without manufacturer support, but a new manufacturer providing a low-cost base could very well pop up and grow quickly if they establish an ecosystem.
The typical commercial farmer is going to be no more concerned about the software being locked down than the CEO of a marketing firm is concerned about Adobe products being locked down. It's not the core competency. They are using the product of a third-party vendor because they don't want to have to deal with it.
But technology is expensive. That's the play here: To strip the tech so that the tractor can be sold for a fraction of the cost. And for the farmers who don't need tech, that might be appealing. They will never win over the farmers who are already buying equipment with all the bells and whistles, but there could be an opportunity to capture those who are still in something 50 years old and are looking to update to an affordable newer machine that isn't worn out.
Repairability will be the biggest concern for any potential customer. It helps that they've tried to stay as "off-the-shelf" as possible, but the article suggests they struggle to keep parts already and there is no dealer network to see that the parts are sitting where the farmers are located. John Deere is the market leader mostly because they've worked hard to make sure you can get parts as soon as you need them and not have to wait days/weeks to have it shipped from across the country/world, if they exist at all. The Belarus tractor saga taught farmers the hard lesson of what happens when the machine is cheap to buy but parts are difficult to source long ago.
This makes me think of the new toyotas, the rav4s, 4runner, and land cruiser. Through government regulations, they were forced to create smaller more fuel efficient engines. To get the same power, they overstrain them, and put huge turbos on the engines. The outcome is a strictly worse engine, that essentially uses the same fuel as older engines.
The demand for older vehicles in certain segments is actually increasing
> overstrain them, and put huge turbos on the engines
This doesn't really mean anything. You can build an engine at any point of the spectrum from naturally aspirated to turbocharged, to turbo-compound, to actually not having any pistons at all (e.g. the "turbofans" that we put on airliners). What you want is to match the engine to the machine and build it out of the right materials.
Most people don't know shit about engineering and have weak intuition about materials, stress and physics in general. What the common person thinks about a random engineering topic literally does not matter, because they are 90% wrong about everything. Regarding cars, it's more like 99%. People still recite torque figures like they mean anything, ffs. That bad boy with 200 Nm at the crank? Cool, I make 150 Nm pedalling a bike.
My previous car before an EV had a 1-litre 3-cylinder engine, a 1.0 TSI. Pure gas, not a hybrid. That's an engine that's rated for 81kW (it actually delivers a bit more than that) and that can do 60 mpg on country roads (regularly). When it came out in 2015, "car enthusiasts" were laughing hysterically at the idiots who'd buy the car and have to replace the engine every 2-3 years. 11 years later, the cars are driving around just fine. The 1.0 TSI, just like the entire EA211 family, is a good engine with no major reliability issues.
I've got a 1995 FZJ80 and I am counting the fucking minutes until I can rip that goddamn forklift motor out and replace it with the 1HZ + HX30 + 1HD-T rods mashup I have in store for it :P
I want this for cars but to keep the modern powertrain. So an EV without the tracking/touch screens, etc etc. Or an internal combustion engine car that is just simple and efficient (and again, no tracking). I'll take the low-tech but nice features like heated seats and power windows still thank you.
People who says this never even consider Nissan Leaf. "Because the charging..." or whatever.
So consumers DO want all-touchscreen disposable cars like Tesla - it's similar to how disposable phones had replaced phones with removable batteries(even among IP rated phones). Wallets vote strongly against consumers.
The problem is that the difference between a low tech and a high tech diesel tractor is mostly emissions and some loss of efficiency. The difference between a low tech and a high tech electric car is a 25 mile range and a 250 mile range, a top speed of 35 mph and 100 mph, carrying capacity and so on.
I recently did a lawn tractor conversion from gas to electric and what I got was in my opinion significantly better and more reliable than a commercial option at 20% of the price but it is limited to 4mph. Scaling it to 5 would require a lot of custom fabrication and a much more expensive drive motor. Once this tech is significantly better and cheaper to the point of being a commodity it will be a different story. For now it just isn’t.
There is a golden era of cars, say 5 to 10 years ago that have things like heated seats but no tracking.
Personally I have a 2019 Mazda 3 which has camera vision all around, radar cruise control and heated seats but no lane assist bumping you around or a cellular connection relaying any information.
The only anti feature it has is that stupid idle stop, but that’s easy to permanently disable. It also has car play but doesn’t have a touch screen.
Anyway I’m not saying you should get this car specially but there are cars out there that are like what you want.
Most 10+ years old cars don't have tracking, and many of those engines just keep working fine with basic maintenance. Our BMW F11 from 2014 is one of such cars, no interference or connections, 250 HP is enough for family car, big trunk, 4WD.
Extremely comfortable and especially on long hauls, extremely nice experience to drive (people like to bash bmw owners but its really a premium experience to drive and not just look at, at least this one and previous E46 one certainly are). Of course heated seated, power windows and best implementation of laser hud projection on windshield I ever saw.
Most modern basic/middle class cars feel like half-assed shit compared to it. Cost peanuts these times too.
the current trend in the industry (before ai everything) has been software defined vehicle [1].
while the ux has been horible, the things hidden away from us are also becoming very bloated, and beyond the microcontroller-level complexity.
as a side-effect, even if you build a modern, mass-market car without screens, the ones in the future would still need to be connected to the manufacturer for ota updates for core functionality. expect supply-chain issues like people faced with axios, etc.
Same. We are even seeing electronics come to bicycles now too, with electronic shifting (with questionable security, at that). I still ride a bike with mechanical shifting and external cable routing for a reason. It's dead simple, and I can do my own wrenching at home, and most repairs & adjustments are a matter of minutes instead of hours.
I don't want a laptop & to do a brake bleed for every minor tweak or fix, nor do I want to have to charge my bike.
This is also why I still drive a much older car and will hang on to it as long as I possibly can.
I think repairability/right to repair sometimes misses the simplicity aspect. Being able to repair something is great, however its less great if its extraordinarily complicated or you need to hire outside expertise. Keeping the machine as simple as possible so repairs can be done at home, with standard tools, is the real win. Its the difference between replacing a phone battery by sliding off a removable back cover, or needing a special toolkit and a heat gun to remove the screen and melt the adhesive first.
> Or an internal combustion engine car that is just simple and efficient
This is basically a contradiction. The last 15 years of efficiency improvements were achieved by adding complexity: turbochargers, automatic start/stop, direct injection, ECU controlled fuel ratios, etc.
Strongly recommend a ~2018 ICE Toyota (chosen for the goal of long-term ownership and maintenance, which includes widespread part availability and my own ability to make reasonable repairs to it at some point).
A friend is an organic farmer in Saskatchewan who has been buying specifically older mechanical only tractors; after a heart attack that will require him to sell off his farm, he’s finding lots of potential buyers.
What is it with American companies that eventually always try to sell crap and low moral products/services. As if the people are educated in luring people into traps to only benefit themselves.
Is part of the appeal due to the fact that being remanufactured engines they don't need modern emissions control, aka Diesel Exhaust Fluid (DEF)? Farmers hate DEF.
That's most of it. It gets lost in the right to repair conversation, I think because many of the same individuals who care about that also tend to be very pro-environmental-regulation, but one has to take a step back and acknowledge the fact that the EPA made it illegal to build this tractor new instead of with a rebuilt truck engine from the 90s. You literally cannot build a legal diesel tractor in the US that doesn't involve an ECU, sensors, DEF, and all the proprietary electronics to go along with those systems.
If it was legal to build these at industrial scale, we'd already have it in the US because there's blatant market demand for it. This is functionally no different from the shops putting 30 year old diesel engines in modern pickup trucks for the same reasons.
The emissions are so unreliable that the only legal market for vehicles without them in the US is... the federal government.
Good. There should be an option for a straightforward mechanical machine. This also has trickledown effect where hopefully regular town mechanics can fix things based on their historical knowledge of engines. Instead of not wanting to touch anything because of the all the electronics involved.
Also, I know this is a strange parallel, but it feels similar to what Dell and HP did to their servers. They made the BIO so complicated that it takes 5-10 minutes for their severs to boot up. Using an older Dell server with a straightforward BIOS that boots up in 30 seconds feels awesome.
I wish someone would do something similar for TVs. Just a really fantastic panel with only the tech needed to decode HDMI or whatever and show it on the screen. No other tech whatsover: no telemetry, no smart anything, nothing.
That's what I always want -- all of my appliances should look like the ones we got in the 90s/2000s. Some Chinese companies should take this niche or maybe not-niche field, sell at a premium, which hopefully is still cheaper than smart ones.
> Some Chinese companies should take this niche or maybe not-niche field, sell at a premium
A friends dad sold his existing business and has been making $$$ in semi-rural texas importing and selling Chinese skid loaders. This market already exists.
I feel this. I've been looking at ADV bikes and everything on the market has a cellular modem for always on cloud connectivity, and multiple vendors, including Zero (the electric internet darling) are offering paid feature unlocks via apps.
On top of this, I looked at Zero's job postings and they're desperately trying to hire a firmware lead to get the team to use Claude Code (precisely what I want managing a 100hp motor under my ass).
Not only are we in a world where everything is locked down with software, the software is about to get way worse and there's nothing you can do about it.
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[ 2.3 ms ] story [ 97.8 ms ] threadursa-ag.com For (a little bit) more info
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glider_%28automobiles%29#Glide...
(Though these days I've love something electric. I don't need long run time, I'm not doing row crops. Just market gardening and property maintenance stuff. All the electric stuff I see out there is aiming up at the high end and for autonomy / "smart" tractor stuff which I don't care about.)
However, the tech exists for a reason and is not inherently bad, the issue is the lock-in, the lack of choice and interoperability.
IMO, there is plenty of space for an OEM who can play nice with others, offer an open (and vibrant ecosystem), and keep users coming back by choice, not by lock-in.
The marketing excuse for the tech might be features or efficiency, but the reason for the tech is lock-in and minimising product lifetime.
The days when manufacturers had friendly, cooperative relationships with their customers are long gone :( Can we bring them back? I hope so, but am not hopeful.
Tech for improvement for customers vs tech for moats/enshittification, especially when imposed by one side on the other.
The latter is never very good.
It's so bad the FTC and states had to sue Deere over just the right to repair. https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2025/01/...
People are just tired of being mislead and abused by corporations, which is why there is now a market for non-tech products.
But tech in general is perhaps in a growing-up phase, we had Arduinos and Raspberry PI's filling a similar need (computer to electronics being needlessly complicated) that was initially filled from the low-end, but now we have faster SBC's and stuff like Framework laptop's that is expanding the range of options for repariable/replaceable/hackable parts up to the high end today and farming equipment is probably destined to get a similar range of options.
An interesting note here is, will cars also start getting a range of more hackable options, mechanics are ingenious already but it's still very much hacks without manufacturer support, but a new manufacturer providing a low-cost base could very well pop up and grow quickly if they establish an ecosystem.
But technology is expensive. That's the play here: To strip the tech so that the tractor can be sold for a fraction of the cost. And for the farmers who don't need tech, that might be appealing. They will never win over the farmers who are already buying equipment with all the bells and whistles, but there could be an opportunity to capture those who are still in something 50 years old and are looking to update to an affordable newer machine that isn't worn out.
Repairability will be the biggest concern for any potential customer. It helps that they've tried to stay as "off-the-shelf" as possible, but the article suggests they struggle to keep parts already and there is no dealer network to see that the parts are sitting where the farmers are located. John Deere is the market leader mostly because they've worked hard to make sure you can get parts as soon as you need them and not have to wait days/weeks to have it shipped from across the country/world, if they exist at all. The Belarus tractor saga taught farmers the hard lesson of what happens when the machine is cheap to buy but parts are difficult to source long ago.
I predict 6 months before John Deer gets the Alberta UCP on the line and gets a law passed that bans "unsafe tractors" (or the like)
https://www.opensourceecology.org/
https://wiki.opensourceecology.org/wiki/Open_Source_Ecology
The demand for older vehicles in certain segments is actually increasing
This doesn't really mean anything. You can build an engine at any point of the spectrum from naturally aspirated to turbocharged, to turbo-compound, to actually not having any pistons at all (e.g. the "turbofans" that we put on airliners). What you want is to match the engine to the machine and build it out of the right materials.
Most people don't know shit about engineering and have weak intuition about materials, stress and physics in general. What the common person thinks about a random engineering topic literally does not matter, because they are 90% wrong about everything. Regarding cars, it's more like 99%. People still recite torque figures like they mean anything, ffs. That bad boy with 200 Nm at the crank? Cool, I make 150 Nm pedalling a bike.
My previous car before an EV had a 1-litre 3-cylinder engine, a 1.0 TSI. Pure gas, not a hybrid. That's an engine that's rated for 81kW (it actually delivers a bit more than that) and that can do 60 mpg on country roads (regularly). When it came out in 2015, "car enthusiasts" were laughing hysterically at the idiots who'd buy the car and have to replace the engine every 2-3 years. 11 years later, the cars are driving around just fine. The 1.0 TSI, just like the entire EA211 family, is a good engine with no major reliability issues.
So consumers DO want all-touchscreen disposable cars like Tesla - it's similar to how disposable phones had replaced phones with removable batteries(even among IP rated phones). Wallets vote strongly against consumers.
I recently did a lawn tractor conversion from gas to electric and what I got was in my opinion significantly better and more reliable than a commercial option at 20% of the price but it is limited to 4mph. Scaling it to 5 would require a lot of custom fabrication and a much more expensive drive motor. Once this tech is significantly better and cheaper to the point of being a commodity it will be a different story. For now it just isn’t.
Personally I have a 2019 Mazda 3 which has camera vision all around, radar cruise control and heated seats but no lane assist bumping you around or a cellular connection relaying any information.
The only anti feature it has is that stupid idle stop, but that’s easy to permanently disable. It also has car play but doesn’t have a touch screen.
Anyway I’m not saying you should get this car specially but there are cars out there that are like what you want.
Extremely comfortable and especially on long hauls, extremely nice experience to drive (people like to bash bmw owners but its really a premium experience to drive and not just look at, at least this one and previous E46 one certainly are). Of course heated seated, power windows and best implementation of laser hud projection on windshield I ever saw.
Most modern basic/middle class cars feel like half-assed shit compared to it. Cost peanuts these times too.
the current trend in the industry (before ai everything) has been software defined vehicle [1].
while the ux has been horible, the things hidden away from us are also becoming very bloated, and beyond the microcontroller-level complexity.
as a side-effect, even if you build a modern, mass-market car without screens, the ones in the future would still need to be connected to the manufacturer for ota updates for core functionality. expect supply-chain issues like people faced with axios, etc.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_Defined_Vehicle
I don't want a laptop & to do a brake bleed for every minor tweak or fix, nor do I want to have to charge my bike.
This is also why I still drive a much older car and will hang on to it as long as I possibly can.
I think repairability/right to repair sometimes misses the simplicity aspect. Being able to repair something is great, however its less great if its extraordinarily complicated or you need to hire outside expertise. Keeping the machine as simple as possible so repairs can be done at home, with standard tools, is the real win. Its the difference between replacing a phone battery by sliding off a removable back cover, or needing a special toolkit and a heat gun to remove the screen and melt the adhesive first.
This is basically a contradiction. The last 15 years of efficiency improvements were achieved by adding complexity: turbochargers, automatic start/stop, direct injection, ECU controlled fuel ratios, etc.
If it was legal to build these at industrial scale, we'd already have it in the US because there's blatant market demand for it. This is functionally no different from the shops putting 30 year old diesel engines in modern pickup trucks for the same reasons.
The emissions are so unreliable that the only legal market for vehicles without them in the US is... the federal government.
Also, I know this is a strange parallel, but it feels similar to what Dell and HP did to their servers. They made the BIO so complicated that it takes 5-10 minutes for their severs to boot up. Using an older Dell server with a straightforward BIOS that boots up in 30 seconds feels awesome.
A friends dad sold his existing business and has been making $$$ in semi-rural texas importing and selling Chinese skid loaders. This market already exists.
On top of this, I looked at Zero's job postings and they're desperately trying to hire a firmware lead to get the team to use Claude Code (precisely what I want managing a 100hp motor under my ass).
Not only are we in a world where everything is locked down with software, the software is about to get way worse and there's nothing you can do about it.