That would create a opportunity for the EPA to shoot your dog. This isn't a market you can just enter. Manufacturing goods that have to last for decades doesn't start up and scale up like software. It would take so much time to build up a competitor that the incumbents would have more than enough notice to crush you.

I don't know much about tractors, but I don't think you can go much lower than $18k and still make your costs back.

Looking at car world, for cars even with locked ecus, you can get things like piggyback or standalone units, transmission controllers, awd controllers, dynamic suspension controllers, and so on, because there is a huge market for it both in amateur racing and enthusiast modification, and most of these void warranty.

Seems like this would be pretty straightforward to do - in the end, all mechanical equipment follows some raw control signal that easy to intercept and modify. Legally, you can even get around most restrictions by selling programmable modules and then making the software open source.

My guess is that paying John Deer for whatever they ask is not a big deal financially to most (although probably not all) farmers.

Mahindra.