EUtility Electric Tractor is powered by a battery, not diesel | Hacker News Reader

EUtility Electric Tractor is powered by a battery, not diesel

newatlas.com

38 pointsbornelsewhere35 comments

This doesn't cover all tractor uses of course, in the Texas Hill Country (think around Austin) there's a pretty large cohort of people (non farmers) that have enough land to necessitate a tractor or bob-cat that will only be used a few times a month.

Imagine being able to "jettison" your battery pack from your classic car EV conversion to plop into your tractor. I know the swappable battery packs failed to take up with the Tesla model, but think about the secondary machines that need occasional power - tractors, ride on lawn mowers, sentimental classic/ hobby vehicle. Things that could be used in series (you won't be moving your lawn and driving your classic car at the same time) that could also benefit as being a power wall.

High class problem for sure, there's a big opportunity to leverage micro-grids + flexible power.

the main problem here is that a battery big enough to power a skid-steer would be too big to lift by hand. and you couldn't use your skid-steer to lift it, so you'd need a hoist or something.

but once you've got a hoist and are moving a big heavy pack between vehicles, i wonder how much else could be in that transferrable pack. is a skid-steer loader similar enough to a light-duty tractor or mini-hoe that you could transfer the motor, hydraulic pump, and battery between different vehicles?

One that hits me as a caravan owner - I would love to take the drove chain of my main car and just "plug" it into a motor home shell - in fact have the shell be a two parter - a small runabout car and the extra.

the price of a motor home is basically the cost of a car and the cost of a caravan - an electric motors home in this case would be basically half price

How is this meaningfully different from an SUV towing a travel trailer?

This is different to the US, but in Europe a lot of people have smaller cars that aren't suitable for towing caravans. My family's only car can comfortable fit four people, but I don't have a tow bar (and the manufacturer doesn't recommend fitting one). And of course for most people it's much easier to drive a motorhome or campervan, than to drive a car with a caravan.

I think a cool invention would be a (not-very) autonomous electric trailer.

Think of a full trailer - "a freight trailer supported by front and rear axles and pulled by a drawbar"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trailer_(vehicle)#Full_trailer

With something like this it could be "towed" by basically any kind of vehicle. It doesn't really have to be pulled or pushed, it could take hints from the vehicle in front. It might not even have to be attached, except maybe for legal or historical reasons.

Another important point about rv-type travel is that you frequently need to be self-contained. A large battery could do double duty as propulsion and living. It would also be ideal for rooftop and/or awning solar panels. This setup would allow all the comforts of civilization without being hooked up to the grid, or even be near the grid. It could even pay for itself. Drive, then park for a few days and you get free power to go another hop.

People have definitely been tossing this idea around - basically your micro-car could "tow" a 10-ton self-powered autonomous trailer that locks in on guide signals from the rear and drafts your car. Much, much simpler than true autonomous driving - you don't have to read road signs, watch out for cyclists crossing against the light, figure out how to handle a 6-way uncontrolled intersection, etc. You'd probably want some feedback to the lead vehicle to modulate acceleration and braking to match the capabilities of the trailer.

This is (becoming) a good question. If Automous vehicles do become a real thing on the roads (#) then the whole caravanning concept becomes ... curious

- An electric battery / chassis that can transfer between "shells" implies I could swap the every day shell for a larger "sleep in shell". Kept at home or borrowed or stored or rented?

- As below comment says - an automous car could simply just drive the whole "sleeping caravan" around (not any money saver but suddenly the market opens up - people who don't want to have the hassle of towing a two ton trailer can just go and wait for the caravan to arrive (from the rental store perhaps)

It's really just hitting me but unbundling is going to change an awful lot of the real world

(#) It's still a bit dubious - we seem to be like 60% there, 80% is looking challenging.

You could easily have the skid-steer disembowel itsself and then unplug the battery. As long as it didn't topple over from being unweighted.

The problem with this example I think is the price of 45000 USD. I went down a research rabbit hole in this once and largely concluded some cheaper options are either to

- question why you really need a tractor. There's some organic growers on her small plots using push-driven tools rather than riding tractors.

- look into the ge elec-trac community (google it). A tractor built back in the 70s gas crisis that people still cherish. Notably most electric tractor r&d I've seen tends to be done around a gas price crisis (early 70s, 2008)

- seriously consider why you need a tractor if it's small acreage. I've wanted to gift a scythe rather than see people close to me futz with tractors they can't maintain

Here's a few (75 acre, non farmable use case):

- cutting grass

- pulling a stump

- leveling a gravel road after a heavy rain wash out

- pushing around a brush pile

- moving some big rocks around

Good point! Think what I was thinking about was the large suburban homeowner (around 2 acres)

I am that homeowner. Here are some things I use my tractor for: turn compost (6ft tall piles), till a large garden, grade landscaping for drainage, dig holes for posts and plants, distribute mulch, repair driveway and distribute gravel, and help my neighbors with many of these same items.

I also use it to move heavy items like wooden beams and Mac's mom.

All of this could be done without the tractor, so I wouldn't say it's necessary. My back is not wrecked right now, though, I'm glad I have it. Also, I imagine my use will slow after having lived here for longer (only been a few years so far) - we have several projects we want done at the moment.

The way I figure I could rent a tractor for about $150/day when I need it, or buy an old one for $6k to use for many years and then sell it... probably for near $6k (I know I've spent money on maintenance). Renting every other weekend is annoying, and I often work 1 hour in the evening.

Anyway, hopefully this helps answer your question about why someone with a few acres would own such a thing.

My Dad bought a JD2130 in the 1970s for ~$17K and sold it in 2007 for $17K.

I have a hard time seeing this get much traction. The use case for tractors is that you don’t need them all the time, but often when you do need them you need to use them almost continuously. Having to stop for a three-hour charge is almost a non-starter.

This is a bigger issue for larger tractors — when you are harvesting, you just can’t stop. You have to go nearly around the clock until you’re done. You don’t normally use a utility tractor with a front end loader attachment for that. But even for utility tractors, stopping in the middle of a job is an enormous downside. If you are baling hay or drilling fenceposts or loading hay bales, yuo are at the vagaries of the weather and the available daylight. Being able to quickly refuel is a big deal.

I love electric vehicles, but this duty cycle, like ocean-crossing airplanes, is better met by synthetic fuels. (EDIT: unless you plug it into the grid! but if all the farmers did it there's probably not enough capacity)

However, replacing with a fleet of smaller, more generic robots might be there way to go.

Biodiesel is a perfect fit for farm equipment until battery density and charging infra in the field catches up. Filter out those particulates though! Just as bad from biodiesel as it is from fossil diesel.

Honestly, I disagree. This isn't a large farm tractor, it's a compact utility tractor. They're more for small farm / rural residential / hobby farm users, not the scenarios you're talking about.

Compact utility tractors like this are really only used for a couple hours. I use mine once or twice a week -- clear the driveway of snow, rototill the garden, spray the vineyard, box scrape the parking pad, haul some dirt with the loader, mow the back field. None of this is more than a couple hours of continuous use.

And if you consider that there's lots of times you're just sitting there idling while shoveling dirt into the loader, an electric tractor wouldn't even be using energy just sitting there waiting for your load. And bonus: not making noise.

I've been waiting for this for a long time, but the price just isn't there yet.

Also, people bailing hay aren't using compact utility tractors like this. They're using bigger tractors. You couldn't even lift a full round bale with this loader.

First line of article says "If you were a farmer..." So I understand why parent focuses on farm utility.

I agree with parent, productivity is the most important metric for farm equipment. Crops will not wait for you to charge your tractor.

But I also agree with you that this is a toy, not a serious piece of equipment.

You don't seem to understand the categories of tractors in the market. Utility / compact utility tractors are used on farms, but are not the same as a 'farm tractor'. Not used usually for harvesting, bailing, heavy tillage, etc. More for all the other crapload of chores one does. Mowing, some tillage, box scraping, post holes, etc.

And, no, this is no toy. It's more powerful than many compact utility tractors, including mine and has the same type of frame as most of them. Run length wouldn't be an issue for most uses of this class of tractor. Only task I do where I can see it being an issue is if I had to mow for more than a couple hours, or running the wood chipper, where I typically have the tractor parked running the chipper for hours while I feed it.

I am in fact a small farmer and I have and use a compact utility tractor. Sometimes I use it for an hour or two. Sometimes I’m on it all day long.

I lift full 500 lb round bales with my Ford 1320. Very carefully.

I've used a Ford 1500 to move ~500lb round bales and it was on the edge of being safe. Even with a ~800lb implement on the back you're really pushing the capability of that machine. I don't know if I'd touch round bales with a 1320, I'd just roll them by hand(which I've done when the tractor is in the shop).

Now that we've got something appropriately sized(~5k lbs machine) it's a heck of a lot safer to work with bales that size.

I have filled tires and I put a bale on the three point hitch bale fork. As long as you go slow and work on level ground it's fairly stable.

Also, I should correct the record: it isn't a 1320. it's a 1710. I mistyped, and before I noticed my mistake I couldn't edit the OP.

Yup, most of the usage for our CUT is pretty bursty. Longest usage is mowing for ~3 hours. Most CUTs are pretty low on the HP side of things(our's is only 47hp), it's more about weight and gearing.

The mountable extra battery pack might help somewhat. You can rotate through a number of battery packs as you use one and charge the others back home. You still need someone to shuttle them to and from your tractor.

Utility tractors aren't often used continuously, power requirements are very bursty. I've had 16 hour days drilling fenceposts, but the tractor itself would only have travelled a few miles. With a diesel tractor you have to leave it running (not idling) to have power at the PTO to run the auger. With an electric tractor it wouldn't use any appreciable power when the auger isn't running so I would bet you could get a full 16 hours of usage out of it between charges.

You could just tow a generator during harvest.

It sort of fits the mindset too. Just like a tractor, a generator has lots of uses.

The Fully Charged show recently reviewed an electric tractor available in the UK: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ClNdrJRan5k

I wonder if a hybrid drive system similar to the old chevy volts would ever make sense for a tractor. A lot of use cases for tractors (definitely not all, however) are very bursty in nature. I suspect for those use cases you could get away with an engine with a significantly lower peak output.

The old Chevy Volt? You're causing me pain. They only discontinued it last year! Mine doesn't feel "old"

For these kinds of compact utility tractors pure electric makes total sense. But you're right for longer running bigger farm tractors and combine harvesters, etc. you'd probably want a hybrid system.

The front-loader is humorously under powered, it's too expensive, and too heavy. I want one anyway but I wouldn't buy it over a Kubota. How would it perform in 100 degree weather with the battery?

This is cool but I wish they also made a small walk-behind tractor for smaller gardens. I hope one day I will be able to buy something like a BCS but electric.

There are probably BCS electrification projects around.

I've looked in the past. I thought about modifying my old Gravely (which I've since sold), but I lack the machining skills. The drivetrain is super simple, but some adapter plates would be needed. But I think the problem here comes down to weight. It would be very hard to have a large enough battery pack while still having it be maneuverable.

But perhaps one could just have multiple swappable packs, like some electric motorbikes I've seen.

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