alt Hacker NewsAlberta startup sells no-tech tractors for half price
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Wait? No electric tractors yet? Swappable batteries would be perfect.
Absolutely love this! Cummins is a well established engine. Plenty of opportunity to disrupt without having to build out a boatload of tech.
That is honestly probably a bit too far. Going back to pre-ecu times is literally burning money for the owner in form of lower fuel efficiency.
Belarus makes tractors. I bet people could have had these kinds of tractors long ago if not for the sanctions.
Drove a no-tech tractor working on a farm in Tuscany in the early/mid-90s. Best driving experience ever.
I am looking for a no-tech web browser...
I think this just shows how much distrust is in technology improving things nowadays.
Slap a few cheap cameras, a GPS receiver, and Comma.ai and you're fully automated.
I saw George Bush at a tractor factory. He asked what the most important tractor innovation was. No hesitation whatsoever ... air conditioning. AC and a radio, and backup cameras ... there is a place for reasonable electronics.
So better and cheaper? I am no farmer but I'd like to have one
Tech will consume itself.
It is with glee that I will watch it burn.
This is pretty cool! Kinda similar to what Slate is doing with cars.
What prevents these no tech tractors to be electric?
farmers still need tech, they should try provide software (not too much). just the prefect amount and don't become evil like deere.
They should really choose better words for the headline. There is no such thing as a "No-Tech Tractor".
No-tech tractor seems to be a bit of an oxymoron.
For those of us not totally enveloped in the tech bubble I don't think this will be terribly shocking. In general, there's a sizeable and growing number of people who want products with less tech, not more. They're tired of everything being a subscription, overtly planned obsolescence, and inshitification in general.
Now let's do washing machines and refrigerators
this is a great move. Hoping the best for this company
Praying for 100% tariffs on these frankly evil Canadians, importing Chinese state subsidized tractors, trying to destroy our tech sector. I bet they don't even come up to code.
Butlerian Jihad now.
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.
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.
I’ve always thought if we met super advanced aliens they would be… no more advanced than needed. In each domain they would use only the most complex thing needed to accomplish a task and no more.
100 years ago I might cook in a cast iron pan and use a slide rule to compute.
Now I cook in a cast iron pan and use a 5nm scale multi core CPU to compute.
In 100 years I might cook in a cast iron pan and use a topological quantum computer to compute. In my home in a spinning city at a Lunar LaGrange point.
We are in the try everything with everything phase of early technological development.
We need a 'Framework (as in laptop maker) for physical devices'. Basically most of this physical tech can be relatively easily recreated with current tech and 3D printing. In fact probably better done with electric motors and batteries. There is definitly a moat there to be disrupted.
I wonder if one can start a company selling repairable cars, for example, be it electric or gasoline.
I predict the next trend in technology will be low tech or analog whenever possible like SpeedQueen washer/dryers, etc. It's funny looking at antique appliances that actually have superior functionality and features to modern ones. There are old washing machines that have much faster rinse rotation speeds and can empty the water within seconds and almost always have replaceable parts. We need to somehow require machines and appliances be built like this and not this disposable trash we have become used to.
You can get a kubota M5-111 with a closed cab for $70k-100k, cheaper than these. Plus zero percent financing though then for 5-7 years. Well built and a comparable class in terms of weight and horse power.
People aren’t buying them for price, but the first sentence discusses it as if it’s relevant.
My assumption are farmers are trying to skirt the eco rules for vehicles in some way. Which by the way is insanely annoying and has caused issues for all the farmers I know at one point or another. Worse, you can’t fix the ecosystems on your own so you have to get them serviced costing quite a bit and importantly putting your tractor out of commission for a while. It’s why older tractors have a premium
Nice. This is the kind of technology we need when we'll have to fight back against AI overlords.
A few years ago, during the initial stages of the invasion of Ukraine by Russia, John Deere was remotely bricking any tractors that were stolen by Russia.
https://edition.cnn.com/2022/05/01/europe/russia-farm-vehicl...
I'm sure this was meant to be a story about the bad guys being thwarted, but it only made my blood run cold. A single company can remotely destroy the agricultural sector of a country if they felt like it.
This is a welcome development.
A good ox is even cheaper
I think there is a market for cars as well.
15 years ago, Dacia used to make stripped sedans that sold for as cheap as 7.5k euros. It was a wild success. Now, they've pivoted to making modern cars, still on the cheap side, but the cheapest now is a compact car that sells for 13k.
The only reason is that those modern cars have higher margins and there is no competition for cheap cars. So why make cheap cars to kill the market of higher margins ones?
The free market, if it works at all, should produce companies like wheelfront that caters to that share of the population.
We need this for cars.
Good. Simplicity should win out over enshittification in the end.
We badly need right to repair for everything from tractors to iphones.
One minor gotcha is they're currently dependent upon a limited supply of remanufactured and no longer available (NLA) parts. Some supplier(s) is going to have step up and make new ones to keep building and supporting tractors. It's not an unsolvable problem.
For anyone who likes rural shop repair videos of farm (mostly older), passenger, and commercial vehicles of all makes and ages from ancient to modern, they might appreciate Watch Wes Work.
> Pre-war EIA forecasts projected U.S. diesel prices would average $3.47/gallon in 2026. As of late March, the national average hit $5.37/gallon, roughly 55% above where it was expected to be.
Diesel prices will continue to rise so it's not clear what these farmers are actually signing up for.
I would have thought would be 2x price
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.
Next up, cars with no-tech! Bring them on.
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.
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
Hell yeah 12V 5.9 Cummins. The one in my pickup has 250k hard miles on it, some blowby, and it starts right up at -10°F no problem.
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.)
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”.
I don't think the issue is "smarts" in our cars/tractors/light-switches/etc but the lock-in and "authorized repair" bullshit.
On the topic of Smart Home stuff (which is the only topic I'm even slightly qualified to talk about) I've heard about people wanting "dumb houses" after initially people wanting "smart houses". It's my opinion that this desire is driven mainly due to bad experiences and doing smart homes the "wrong way".
What do I mean by that? Either they got burned by XYZ Smart company going under and all their cloud-dependant devices dying/bricking. they had a system like Control4 which required authorized resellers to make even basic changes [0], and/or they were overwhelmed with juggling 5 different apps/platforms that don't talk to each other. That doesn't mean smart homes are bad, just that the hardware/software was bad. I fully recognize that for the "normal" person the only options are currently "bad hardware/software" or "dumb house" but there _are_ better alternatives.
My philosophy for "Smart Home" is one of progressive enhancement (and graceful degradation). What that means is everything I "enhance" with "smarts" should still work the old way that people are accustomed to. Every light in the house can be controlled via "Alexa|Siri|Google turn off the Kitchen Light" but they can also be turned off/on by walking over to the wall and flipping a switch [1]. This means Smart Switches _not_ Smart Bulbs [2]. If my Home Assistant (yes, I'm one of those people) server goes offline, everything still works, the switches work, the door lock works with a key, the garage still opens. My "smart-ifying" of the house is not replacing the way to do something, it's only adding additional control.
In addition to that, and something that should come as no surprise, I refuse to use a cloud, or at least depend on a cloud for my smart home. For this reason I prefer Z-Wave/Zigbee devices. If the manufacturer goes out of business it doesn't matter (no pun intended [3]). While I can, and have, used cloud integrations with Home Assistant, I try to make sure that's just a stopgap to decide if I want to go all-in. I own a few Z-wave devices from companies that don't exist anymore and they have been chugging along without issue for years. I love that stability.
There is nothing in my house where you have to walk over to a wall tablet to control something or open an app on your phone, I would consider that a failure. Everything flows through Home Assistant, it's the brain, I don't want multiple apps fighting or different ecosystems that don't mesh (radio-wise or functionality-wise).
What does this have to do with tractors? Glad you asked! I see this as the same for tractors, they should absolutely be "dumb" with the ability to control/query parts of it and add the "smarts" through an external system. Whatever the equivalent of Z-wave would be for monitoring/controlling the device, not something built-in or required for functionality. A modular, non-locked-down system. I'm sure we are nowhere near that point but I write all this as a "don't throw the baby out with the bathwater", I think John Deere was wrong in how they went about adding "smarts" but I don't think the idea is without merit either. They went down the greedy, anti-right-to-repair route which is clearly wrong.
I'd love to see a combo of Ursa Ag's tractor as a base platform where smarts can be added to it without compromising it's repairability. A take on the "naked robotic core"-idea if you will.
[0] And each time you have a authorized reseller come out they try to sell you on an expensive upgrade because they make (most) their money on selling you stuff, not maintaining it. I really dislike Control4 and things like it.
[1] Point of clarification, I use Decora style paddles as is common on smart switches. The only downside (IMHO) to my system is they always "rest" in the middle orientation so they are "worse" than "dumb switches" in that you can't look at the switch and see the state it's in. That said, 3-way switches have already eroded this ability and I feel like this is an acceptable trade off. Maybe in the future people will care enough to make the switch represent the state correctly (with little servos flipping it) but I don't feel like I'm missing much. You may disagree.
[2] My exception to this rule is I will allow a Smart Bulb as long as there is also a Smart Switch. Maybe you can't change to color temperature via hardware on the wall but you can always still turn it on/off at the wall. Graceful degradation.
[3] My information might be out of date but I have very little interest in Thread/Matter, I don't want my smart devices to _ever_ talk to the cloud. Which is why I love Z-wave/Zigbee, they talk to my hub, my hub talks to whatever I want/approve. I never want my devices updating (or more likely, bricking) due to the cloud. I understand that Thread/Matter do not immediately mean "cloud" and in fact might even require local control but I'll believe it when I see it. So far Thread/Matter have been a massive nothing-burger IMHO. Maybe in a few years I'll be all-in on it but so far, I don't find it compelling at all.
John Deere gonna send fucking assassins after them. Or probably engage them in some endless lawsuit.
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.