Tractor as a service will only bite them back.
Look at how popular 40-year old tractors are :)
It's never been a better time to create a good old repairable machine.
Look at how popular 40-year old tractors are :)
It's never been a better time to create a good old repairable machine.
It's a problem for a lot of reasons. First off it's the complete death of ownership. I can't fix things. At some point they will probably just lock stuff back down if I want to sell, assuming I can even sell without them getting a cut.
Second, repairability takes a nosedive. It's no longer a tough but simple piece of machinery that I can maintain indefinitely with some mostly fairly easy to teach skills. I'm an amateur, but I know enough about how cars work that I'm willing to try and fix most issues, up to the point of needing specialized tooling. Instead it's a world of more expensive parts, DRM, and things that just won't work without a dealer authorized repair.
Then we get to the part where I come off an old fuddy duddy. I don't want a car where someone can push safety critical changes the way we push shitty software updates now. I don't trust them to get it right. I don't want to be sold a car that tries to kill me after a mandatory software update. It's not needed, and it's a bad idea.
Consumers haven't pushed back enough to stop this from happening.
The classic example of rent-seeking, according to Robert Shiller, is that of a feudal lord who installs a chain across a river that flows through his land and then hires a collector to charge passing boats a fee to lower the chain. There is nothing productive about the chain or the collector. The lord has made no improvements to the river and is not adding value in any way, directly or indirectly, except for himself. All he is doing is finding a way to make money from something that used to be free.[4]
The 'river' that manufacturers are putting a chain across is the First Sale Doctrine.
It's just rent-seeking wearing a mask. In a similar sense that the legal difference between a pyramid scheme and an MLM scheme is that the MLM scheme is accompanied by a good or service. Legally legitimate, but still morally objectionable.
This one sticks out to me from a job-market POV.
Plumbers are already on par with psychiatrists in terms of pay. Sure, the work is hard, but from a supply-demand POV, the markets are saying that they do work that is of equal value (all this varies highly, but stick with me here).
Most repair work takes a LOT of experience until the employee is anywhere near proficient. Farmers will tell you that they learned the repair side in very stressful situations and that there is always something that breaks in new, and more expensive, ways each and every time. Repairing even 'simple' machines like a tractor takes a lot of experience.
So, when you add in a computer that intentionally 'breaks' the machine, and then you have the regular machine that will break, and then you have all the linkages that make the computer control the machine (all of which can break), you are requiring that the repair-person be VERY skilled at troubleshooting and repair.
Then, you eliminate most of the ways that people learn to troubleshoot and repair these machines (via these computers), and you are left with even fewer people that will be able to fix the tractors. Think something more like a bio-tech/MRI company's field-service engineers. Those people get paid bank to get sent out to malfunctioning machines and they are trained out the wazoo.
From the tractor manufacturer's perspective, yes, making machines that work for the manufacturer and not the customer, is going to really work out well for this quarter's stock price. But down the road 7 years? I think this is a poison pill.
Plumber median pay is $54,000, while 10% make more than $94,000.
Psychiatrist median pay is $220,000, while 10% make beyond the wage cap for BLS data. https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes291066.htm
It's also a little misleading to compare the numbers that way. It usually takes a lot longer to become a psychiatrist in the first place. Your cumulative earnings in the first ten years after graduating high school might be higher as a plumber; in fact, I suspect most people who become doctors actually lose net worth throughout those ten years due to student loans. They just don't count towards the median income for a psychiatrist because they spend much more time not being a psychiatrist.
Once the plumber and psychiatrist are both in a position where they're running their own business or practice, their income is more of a conscious choice than it is for someone who's working for an employer. Self-employed people can and do sometimes choose to earn less money in exchange for more free time, and it's a lot easier to do that when you don't have six figures of debt at the start of your career.
It definitely feels like "big business" is working against us in this regard. Everything new is locked down because the the rent-seeking those software locks enable. It's a drag on our economy and we've got to stop letting them do this to us.
I stumbled across open source ag / construction efforts years ago, but haven't kept tabs on them since.
And thanks for spending your time on something so useful to society!
And thanks for the kind words! I have been pretty sick of working jobs that don’t broadly benefit society. I’m blessed to be working at a beautiful farm on open source tech!
I think they are still iterating a fair bit on the micro tractor. But overall it seems there was a flurry of activity around 2014 but then it has tapered off.
IMHO, I think they set their sights a bit too high, with the whole construction set. Would have been better to focus on just the tractor first, getting the documentation really hammered out. It is such an essential piece of farm equipment. But as it stands, nothing on their wiki is really viable to contribute to, because you can't really work off of it.
I don't want a bridge where someone can make repairs the way we make shitty pothole repairs now. I don't trust them to get it right. I don't want to pay taxes for a bridge that tries to kill me after mandatory repairs. It's not needed, and it's a bad idea. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I-35W_Mississippi_River_bridge
Here's a neat idea: maybe regulating software engineering like other engineering disciplines is actually overdue? Yet at the same time, failure rate will never be zero.
Alternatively, we should renounce all engineering regulations and let anybody with a rivet gun build bridges. and airplanes.
Please could you describe this more? I’m intrigued.
I don’t know anything about this and what systems or mechanisms are used to regulate engineering, so any links or simple explanations are appreciated!
If you want to e.g. build a bridge it needs to be signed off on by an appropriately licensed and qualified Professional Engineer. Essentially the parent comment is saying there should be streams of software development that meet the requirements to become a Professional Engineer. Then places e.g. medical, defence, power plants could say "we need software that's been signed off by an engineer" and have assurance that the final product is of a known quality and unlikely to have any life and safety endangering defects. They are strongly incentivised to only sign off on properly engineered projects as they can be held personally liable e.g. if a bridge fails and kills someone.
An example of the level of quality that would be delivered is the software that ran on the space shuttle. See this article https://www.fastcompany.com/28121/they-write-right-stuff for an insight into how it was developed and the practises required.
I don't think all software developers should be software Engineers, but being able to lead a team to enforce quality (and not sign off on poorly thought out "MVP" crapware) would guarantee that the software that came out of that team would be reliable and well designed. It would be good for software engineering overall to be recognised as a legitimate branch of engineering. Unfortunately it seems like most of the industry does not have the sort of rigour needed for engineering tasks.
I think the only way this could happen would be if SWE only used waterfall or some similar kind of practice. Agile and the like might be able to be tweaked to work, but even there...
The problem in software is that you can basically "start in the middle" of something and work your way outward; start coding something, get the design details later and refactor.
You can't do that with a bridge or other regular engineering work. You have to plan, design, multiple sign-offs, etc - then build, and you can't build it randomly or a component here and there then fit it all together (well, you can to an extent, depending on the project and design), and if anything changes - well, in a real project it can't change much, not without a lot of money and time being lost.
Several years back there was a series of commercials on TV, I think for an insurance company, which showed (using CGI effects) "impossible building strategies" - one showed a huge scaffolding structure and cranes building something like the Great Pyramid from the top downward (for instance); I think another had some kind of skyscraper being built from the middle outward or something of that nature.
That's essentially SWE applied to regular engineering - or at least, that's how it feels at times. Now tack on Agile and other practices, and it gets 10x worse. Actual engineering is a strict discipline, starting with almost set-in-stone practices along with a lot of hard-won knowledge about materials and mechanics (books filled with tables and diagrams), that are then all used to inform an engineering design, which is then tested and retested in simulation, perhaps coupled with scale models that are also tested, and the plans changed and signed off by multiple other engineers, etc - long before it ever gets to building the thing.
And then that thing is built in a very specific and strict manner; I won't further belabor the point.
Even with all of this, sometimes things fail terribly.
Today in software, we have a ton of tools and practices we are constantly trying - and despite all of them, at least from my perspective - things really haven't gotten much better than they were 20-30 years ago. I would say that widespread use of software versioning tooling and testing frameworks, etc (plus automated build and deployment) have made some of it better - but even after all that, we still seem to be making the same number of bugs and errors that we had before (and rather than a QA department usually, we've farmed this out to the end user for the most part).
So while I'd love to see SWE become more like regular engineering practices (with the selfish request that I and others like me could be "grandfathered" in, as I don't have any kind of compsci or comparable degree, but I have been doing this for 25+ years) - I just don't see it happening for the above rational and reasons.
I could be wrong, though (and if anyone has a counter argument, please post it - I'd love to read it)...
I realize that this kind of misquoting is a traditional "hacker" style of debate. But speaking only for myself, it really rubs me the wrong way.
If you disagree with someone, don't resort to cheap shots like that. Make your point in your own words and with your own logic. You will have a stronger argument and a better chance of informing and educating the rest of us.
If the market demands it, which with the advent of computers on tractors platform this can and will be modified to allow for the maximum utility for the end user. I see nothing wrong with this.
* You have to make your machine good the first time. The customer buys it completely, no chance to update and fix things.
* Your machine is marketed as reliable. This means it has to be reliable, so you put a lot of effort / material / money into your machine, when your competition puts in much less.
* If your machine is indeed reliable, your customers won't show up for another in a few decades(!). They also won't need many spare parts. This will make your machine much more expensive up front. On a market where an average machine is priced in hundreds of thousands USD, this may be a deal breaker.
* Since you are a newcomer, there's little implicit trust to you, right when you are selling very expensive hardware much higher than competition.
It looks like everything is stacked against you.
And I'm speaking from growing up in a village with the highest agricultural % of population in Belgium. Which my family is also pretty involved with ( my dad is a veterinarian for farm animals, my uncle has ~40 tractors)
Also: a cousin with a garage, some friends who work at a big manufacturer and another cousin who with worked there.
My background influenced my opinion, not a unfunded comment like yours. I am curious what your background is, it's far from reality up here.
Mechanical parts are becoming a selling point. Just no manufacturer realizes it yet, because of "subscription access", lol.
I'd actually buy a mechanical environmental-friendly car. Not some electrical car that needs an overpriced official garage to work on. I want the guy I know, to work on my car. Because it's simple to fix and it didn't need a official licensed laptop to be serviced.
And I'm not alone:
https://tractorhacking.github.io/
https://www.vice.com/amp/en_us/article/xykkkd/why-american-f...
https://www.vice.com/amp/en_us/article/kzp7ny/tractor-hackin...
On a personal note, it means I'm abandoning Mercedes-Benz for my next car or have a lease from work.
Ps. All newcomers try full-electric cars. Which have a lot of breaking parts.
I agree. In fact an electric car could be simple. Just because it has an electric motor doesn't mean it has to have a computer too.
It should serve the driver, and be low-profile and unobtrusive.
I should also add that i mostly just want a car, i don't need it to drive for me, I think the telsa's could be very very simple if they dropped all the self driving stuff. I know they won't but it would be cool to buy a crate telsa engine and battery pack for a rolling chassis without the infotainment system.
Even electric scooter size motors will have smart controllers. They're a big market for microcontrollers, e.g. TI: http://www.ti.com/solution/dc-input-bldc-motor-drive
This is exactly my point.
Imagine that you are selling cars. If you sell a reliable, easy to fix car, you don't get any recurring revenue. But you need to make as much money as the competition who sells less reliable cars, and more because you can't cut corners. So your upfront cost is higher.
The competition, which sells less reliable cars, can ask much less upfront, and offset this by some recurring revenue from fixing it periodically at licensed mechanic shops that pass a cut to the manufacturer.
This is very much like inkjet printers are sold at a loss, and the money is made on selling the ink which is regularly needed. But with cars (tractors, etc) the manufacturer sells maintenance / spare parts.
In this way, the manufacturers of service-intensive machines credit the buyer initially, but then more than make it up in the "interest" payments.
This is sad dynamics, but I don't see an easy way out of it.
I hope there exists a large enough segment of consumers who distinctly prefer the more expensive, more reliable; from your words, you seem to belong to it. But I'm not sure such consumers are a majority.
For cars, at least, "discounted" repairs are pretty much impossible in the USA: manufacturers aren't allowed to own the service shops here, by law. The service has to be done by independent dealers. Of course, the manufacturer could heavily subsidize this service (by paying most of the cost directly to the dealer), but that's going to take away all their profits.
https://www.lada.ru/en/cars/4x4/3dv/about.html
it hasn't changed much, it's still serviceable with a hammer and a couple of pulleys and wrenches. Not sure if it's available in Belgium(it is in eastern europe) and it sure as hell isn't as comfy as a BMW or a MB, but it's cheap to buy and maintain.
Garage 54 English (dubbed) channel - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCCydCOEgfcXAQnkRaLCTsAQ
Garage 54 Russian channel (has more videos) - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCBByzLy3MGJT8UMVLYLScNg
> Your machine is marketed as reliable. This means it has to be reliable, so you put a lot of effort / material / money into your machine, when your competition puts in much less.
The good news on this front is that every single patent covering a 40 year-old machine is expired. That means a lot less upfront cost of designing a reliable one. You'll want to redesign the body panels to avoid copyright; you'll want to consult with the community to patch some known defects; but there's no need to reinvent the whole danged thing. And that can go a long way towards establishing trust in your brand.
What if the primary form of business is selling the parts instead? Then repair shops become the primary customer, with home repairs and selling the actual vehicle just being the PR model for adoption?
You say they won't need many spare parts. But thanks to emissions regulations, they'll still have to have plenty of electrical components, and those do still break. Easily.
Even on the old-style tractors, I've still replaced plenty of parts. Things do break. Simple things that are easy to replace, but you still need the parts. Clutches, bearings, etc. Tractors are exposed to harsh environments for most of their lives. Plenty never ever come indoors.
The engines don't often need replacing. But plenty of other things still do.
AFAICT, say, John Deere do nearly the same thing. But they insist on your using their own spare parts (not cheaper third-party parts, or something you fixed yourself), and go to great lengths way to ensure that (with chips, online activation, etc).
All of your points are related to making it reliable, but all it needs is to be repairable. Then look what happens:
> Your machine is marketed as reliable. This means it has to be reliable, so you put a lot of effort / material / money into your machine, when your competition puts in much less.
Or you do the opposite, get it to market quick so you can undercut them on price. Then people buy it for the lower price and don't mind as much when it breaks because the repairs are cheaper. Paying $500 twice is far better than paying $10,000 once.
> If your machine is indeed reliable, your customers won't show up for another in a few decades(!). They also won't need many spare parts.
If it's of average reliability but more repairable then you'll do above average business selling spare parts because your equipment will remain in service longer. Meanwhile your customers will also notice that they're paying much less for repairs than your competitors' customers, and good reviews and word of mouth will drive new sales from other people.
> Since you are a newcomer, there's little implicit trust to you, right when you are selling very expensive hardware much higher than competition.
Which is where the repairability comes in again. If you can only get replacement parts from the manufacturer then the customer has to worry whether the manufacturer will still be in business in ten years, but if you can get parts from any third party parts supplier even after the manufacturer is long gone then the customer doesn't have to worry about that.
Especially now "right to repair" is gaining traction and reducing waste is becoming a social issue.