I've got a broken combine harvester – manufacturer won't give me software key
theregister.com
theregister.com
For anyone that doesn't know, farm equipment generally lasts a long time. There are farms out there still operating 70+ year old John Deere tractors. With proper servicing such equipment lasts a really long time.
Nowadays such equipment attracts a premium simply because it is so simple and can be serviced by the owner for many simple things. You don't need to pay for and (sometimes worse) _wait for_ a "qualified" tech with the right computer to fix a faulty sensor.
Companies deliberately make equipment that cannot be serviced to increase total revenue and it's a disgusting and egregious form of rent-seeking.
As an aside, your car's warranty is essentially a scheme to make more money similar to this. Using parts of services that aren't "genuine" can void your warranty.
There is basically nobody out there operating even a 80s combine because when you are dealing with razor thin commodities margins a couple percent efficiency in machinery applied across your whole fleet can/will make or break you.
Some boutique fruit farmer on a tiny amount of land an hour from Boston might be using an old tractor but nobody outside that sort of use case is running antiquated equipment. Not to say everyone is running locked down JD crap but old equipment isn't nearly as responsible for the contents of the supermarket as HN likes to think it is.
>As an aside, your car's warranty is essentially a scheme to make more money similar to this. Using parts of services that aren't "genuine" can void your warranty.
This was made illegal decades ago.
And are these tractors used as their daily equipment or do they use something more modern by default and only bring the old stuff out on the rare occasions when the number of tractors doing tractor things is a big enough production bottleneck to warrant it?
I work on plenty of old junk for people. I know how this kind of stuff gets used and how important it is and isn't to business operations. There are a very tiny number of people who run large fleets of old junk with enough redundancy they are not lacking for uptime. These people are a rounding error compared to the number of people who have one or more new-ish machines and keep a couple pieces of old junk (usually very large or very niche machines) around for a particular use that the newer machines could cover but not as well as something dedicated. And this is how it works in pretty much any industry that uses heavy equipment, not just farming.
Of course the largest exposure to the right to repair issue is with the large farms. They run the greatest percentage of newest (so greater likelihood of incident) and largest (greater impact of downtime) equipment. However, I'd say the greatest existential risks could easily be with the smaller farms that are running new kit. You're less likely to have backup equipment and are going to struggle getting priority from service teams when you're the smallest of ten customers that are broken down.
Otherwise, the old equipment is typically used for odd jobs around the farm, like the use case of hauling produce you mentioned.
I'd agree that you see it less often with combines; they're a much more complicated machine.
I would say a lot of farmers who own their land are able to keep costs down & make a decent profit with older equipment. It's cheaper & can be easier/cheaper for them to fix instead of taking it somewhere.
I also recall stories about the amount of fertilizer one puts down being similar. Some people crowd their crops & spend a lot on additional fertilizer to try to boost their yields. Some try to keep costs down & accept a smaller yield. A large amount of variables seem to determine who comes out ahead.
I don't think you need a tractor for fruit farming.
Engines aren't really a problem as long as you don't let Washington bureaucrats tell you what to put on them (emissions components are a long term consumable on modern diesel engines).
There's all sorts of incremental improvements to things that just make the machines easier to operate and faster at what they do. More and more equipment (or functions on said equipment) has been going hydraulic over time and machines have been adding more and more auxiliary circuits to support that. If you're moving a lot of stuff not on pallets a pair of forks that has hydraulic width adjustment is a huge upgrade over manual. Joystick style controls are a lot smoother and faster to operate than lever style controls. New mostly glass cabs have amazing visibility compared to the mostly sheet metal cabs of old. Having a cab at all greatly improves your ability to work in the elements. A 10yr difference in equipment isn't much but for a given HP you'll start seeing a big difference in productivity at 20-30yr as all the little stuff adds up.
The power output of an engine that achieves 30mpg today is easily double that of just 15 years ago.
Turbos are a good example. Before, they were very expensive to add to a car, and altered the driving experience such that they weren't very practical for the average driver. Now, essentially every new combustion engine has them because you can lower displacement and actively manage power output to a greater degree, pushing up efficiency.
Some cool things are on the horizon as well, like camless engines and opposed piston diesel engines.
>The power output of an engine that achieves 30mpg today is easily double that of just 15 years ago.
That's a complete lie.
And you're completely wrong. And this can be trivially easily confirmed by looking up the power outputs of vehicles that get any given fuel economy today vs the power outputs of vehicles of like fuel economy from decades past.
With respect to small diesels specifically, ever since diesels went from naturally aspirated indirect injection to direct injection and turbos power output has skyrocketed while fuel economy has mostly flat-lined.
Fuel economy is mostly dependent on the displacement of the engine and the load to do work (like cruise the highway or plow a field at part throttle) so it doesn't vary much unless the efficiency of converting fuel to force improves (hard) or the demands of the task decrease (hard for cars, even harder for industrial applications).
Edit: Also, you're confusing theoretical and practical efficiency. For instance, a V8 engine can be 30% efficient in absolute terms, but if you can use an I4 for the same application because you now have a Turbo, your real world efficiency is way higher. This is exactly what we see happening in performance cars an large trucks: big displacement being replaced with turbos and hybrid systems.
Diesel's engine used 317g/kWh.
So the amount of fuel used has not even halved in more than a century.
In Europe, yes, due to extremely stringent fuel consumption regulations — essentially, the engine needs to have very small displacement, so you need to add turbo to get at least some power out of it. A typical new car in Europe has turbocharged 1.2L engine or something in this neighborhood. In the US, however, naturally aspirated 2.0L engines are still king.
This is true. In fact, some manufacturers (Volvo ?) have new models that are both super and turbo charged.
But this isn't cost-free - these are tremendously complicated engines running at very close tolerances. These will have higher failure rates and will be more expensive to maintain and fix.
Remember, kids: There's no replacement for displacement.
During the busy seasons farmers are working 16 hours days and they can't afford for the machines to break. However there are off months where nothing needs to be done now. The busy season for a corn farmer is planting in April, and Harvest in October, and random weeks between them for weed control (These months vary by regions and should be taken as an example not truth), with the time in between mostly filled with activities that need to be done but there is no hurry to do them today.
Some of the work it did wasn't time critical, but some was. In winter, animals need to be fed daily.
That old tractor was more reliable than the newer ones.
When he sold the tractor along with the farm, he got more than it sold for brand new in the early seventies.
After inflation?
Personnaly we have an old combine from at least the 70 when we need a small field to be harvested. The rest we contract to other people. We have a few tractors from the 60 for small work, but use mostly tractors from the 90/2000 for field work.
A classmate of mine, who now farms their family farm, still runs a large 4WD tractor that must be 50+ years old at this point. They have newer equipment, but the old stuff still gets used.
> This was made illegal decades ago.
AIUI, only for consumer equipment. The Magnuson–Moss Warranty Act “generally” (non-strictly) excludes commercial and industrial equipment. It strictly, explicitly, and strongly excludes agricultural equipment from its pro-consumer requirements.
§ 700.1 (b)
https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/CFR-2018-title16-vol1/xm...
The 'old' tractors are basically a motor strapped to a chasis (e.g. JD 4020). Although my gut reaction is to side with the farmers, its not so black and white. Nobody is making them buy these 'locked down' tractors, they are choosing to. Money could speak louder than words
> Nowadays such equipment attracts a premium simply because it is so simple and can be serviced by the owner for many simple things.
The comment is about how old, well-maintained equipment is simple and attracts a premium.
The manufacturers are coupling "locked down" tractors with... you know, tractors. If there are competitively produced tractors without the restrictions on owner maintenance, they will sell better, but if that market doesn't exist, the farmers cannot simply vote with their wallets. The complexity of the modern tractors does make it a difficult market for new entrants, so the existing ones own the market, and choose some of the restrictions.
It's not a simple problem - modern systems are complex, and so it's not trivial to ensure it's repairable without sophisticated tools and knowledge, but it's still a problem worth examining.
Not in the United States it can't. Nor can making repairs or modifications, unless the manufacturer can provide proof that your actions were what caused the issue you're asking to be corrected under warranty.
A nationwide independent farmers strike on the basis of right-to-repair laws probably wouldn't get off the ground but if it did then effect might be less than what is needed to effect change and could very well play right into the hands of their opposition.
People no longer spin their own thread, weave their own cloth, and make their own clothes.
Most of the metal objects we own are cranked out by the millions in a factory, not hand-forged by the village blacksmith.
And so on.
To the extent those activities still exist, they are hobbies, or maybe skills exhibited as part of a tourist attraction.
For some reason, though, the "family farmer" still has mystique, while the "family weaver" and the "family blacksmith" don't. There are a number of reasons for that, but on a basic level, the situations are exactly the same, and are occurring for exactly the same reasons -- large-scale mechanized production is simply more efficient on every level.
When clothes were spun, woven, and tailored by hand, most people could only afford one or two garments.
When all metal objects were hand-forged by a smith, they were scarce and super-expensive. Sometimes people would burn down old buildings just to salvage the nails.
Same thing with food. Other than for psychological or medical reasons (anorexia and such), it is very, very rare for people to starve to death in modern Western societies. That wasn't the case in the era of the "simple family farmer".
It is also somewhat different from other "traditional" professions/trades in that it was not obsoleted by factories and mass production.
"Family weaving" disappeared because it became economically unviable. "Family farming" did not disappear because it is still economically viable, and it holds an extra-special place in the American cultural identity.
People romanticize small farms because they're stuck in crowded cities working industrial rat race jobs that are meaningless in the large scheme of things. Is it any wonder that the idea of space, beautiful natural surroundings and a hand in creating something really meaningful (and what is more meaningful than food?) would lead there?
I don't think that actually works. Corn farmers could short corn futures or buy put options to lock in their price, and if Walmart tried to drop the nationwide price of corn by 30% to drive some farms out of business, that would cost many many billions competing with finance companies.
Plus the government puts limits on the number of futures positions you can have outstanding, to prevent market manipulation. And it's illegal to collude with others to get around it.
I don't agree with the idea that we don't need regulation, but it's important to consider that telling people they need the government to protect them will lead to those people pushing back even harder against change.
And the parent comment was talking about how a strike due to right-to-repair would backfire which, to me, was implying that strikes couldn't work at all. I don't believe that's true which is why I pointed out that a strike could help for other issues. I don't know what else a farmer might strike over in terms of the issues they currently face, so I just reused what the parent comment was stating as fact. But if there are other similar issues affecting them now, you could swap one of those in.
"Vote with your wallet" is only possible in certain markets and for certain goods. It is not the norm.
Just be-careful of the weapons you choose to wield against well funded campaigns. Do we want another “giving access to car maintenance data will lead to you being attacked in dark car parks”?
My point is, if the anti right to repair side came out with “omfg, rtr will allow hackers to attack food production”; we can come back with pointing out how dumb of an idea it is (just no one point out the car hacking village to anyone :-p), but if you lead with the national security angle, you have given the the anti r2r side free rein to say “no, closed locks are better then open locks when it comes to keeping the bad guy out of your home”.
and bootloader locks (and reasonable smartphone).
Prop up the next excuse!
But the issue I personally have with "firmware write enable" switches is that the ave person doesn't want to mess about with then every time there is an update and bootloader locks are still locks you often have to seek the permisson of the vendor to unlock OR they get disabled once you need "unsupported access" and not re-enabled (sometimes, re-enabling them disables what ever you needed it disabled for in the first place so you can't re-enable it).
One of the criticisms of Windows XP was that lots of "ave joes" just ignored Windows Updates, so even though MS released patches for bugs you could still find plently of vulnerable systems, after all your ave joe just wants to "get on with it" when they are using their computer. Putting in hinderances for the "avg joe" will (imo) only lead to fewer devices taking up firmware updates.
However a) we are talking about farm gear, so its not like its your "avg joe" using them, plently of farmers are used to getting it fixed, even if its just a bodge so they can get their job done b) if the bootloaders/firmware switch still allows updates from "a trusted source" while locked then it doesn't hinder auto-updates and allows the techies of the world to play outside the sandbox.
Trying to retrofit the same code to 100k different models of machine will never work, even when we're at Windows 18.
Educate the people around you about basic computing shit, and donate to institutions that do it at scale.
No, they don't. In fact, this makes them MORE vulnerable IMO. Hack John Deere and push a malicious update that bricks the fleet.
I fully agree that its just a single supplychain hack away from remote bricking not just John Deere but also pretty much anything connected.
I'm just trying to make the point that the other side are not against using scare tactics already, do we really want to push them to even greater scare tactics?
EDIT: Remember, its not the geeks you have to win over, its the general public and / or lawmakers (who stereotypically have not always what I would call "geeks") that have to be won over.
Thankfully in that Massachusetts case the bill allowing mechanics to access the data passed, I personally don't think an escalation of the tactics from our side would end well for us.
That would make it immune to any cyber terrorist without physical access to each individual machine. If they did have access to a significant amount of farm equipment, then software protection would be the least of the concerns in terms of food security.
There are free designs for a large number of useful machines, but the trade off is that you have none of a manufacturers’ warranties for safety or useful life. Personally, I think it’s a lot more palatable to subsidize open designs that can be easily modified by a user instead of legally compelling a manufacturer to give the world their intellectual property. I think a few $M in grant programs to uni engineering programs with a few paid senior industry consultants could really make a difference (I think the motive force behind OSE is basically one guy).
Don't threaten me with a good time. There's insane level of harm both medically and financially that comes from locking life saving drugs behind patents.
Actually...yes.
If someone catches wind/reverse engineers/synthesizes Pfizer drugs and saves themselves or others on a small enough scale tax authorities don't even chase them, I think humanity benefits.
JD is using the DMCA to try blocking this. Their legal argument is that the firmware in the tractor or harvester is copyrighted and that locking down the firmware is a copyright control. Therefore, the DMCA can be used as a cudgel to sue people who bypass the controls to let people maintain the physical equipment they have purchased.
IANAL, but the courts have long maintained that making copies of minimal portions of a work or distributing slightly modified copies of parts of a work for the purposes of compatibility fall under fair use.
https://www.publicknowledge.org/press-release/supreme-court-...
Lexmark v. Static Control Components would appear to be relevant. So would Atari Games Corp v. Nintendo of America, Inc. Apple Computer, Inc. v. Franklin Computer Corp. seems relevant.
If there is no way to make something compatible but the way the vendor has used, US copyright doctrine suggests that way is not protected by copyright or that it is a fair use infringement upon copyright to do things the same way. If, however, there is some creative creative decision made in implementation of an expression of an idea, then the expression and implementation retain full copyright protection. Some other expression of the same thing for the purpose of compatibility, though, would be fair. This is why Franklin could not copy Apple's firmware but could reverse engineer it. It's why Eagle couldn't copy the IBM BIOS but Compaq could reverse engineer it.
The only way to use a third-party part or even to reset the tracking of a first-party sensor for some of these John Deere products is to circumvent the protections on the firmware.
I would expect John Deere to try to use Vernor v. Autodesk in which it's determined that some fine print about software being licensed vs. sold means you can't resell the software after taking possession of it. However, firmware for a tractor is not remotely the same as a CAD or video editing application. It's not a useful thing in its own right and is not the product. It is simply a necessary part of the physical device which was sold.
Hopefully the Librarian of Congress or the Congress itself addresses this intentional crippling of physical goods. It's a troublesome loophole in the DMCA and it's being abused. If the courts take it up, I'm hoping an appeals court or the Supreme Court realizes the difference between a commercial application for installation on a general-purpose computer and the firmware in a tractor, Bluetooth speaker, car, smartphone, or whatever and choose common sense.
That's what it looks like; at the very least, they are extremely short staffed vs the problems they want to tackle. They have been at it for years and have barely made progress in terms of the actual wiki.
Their main problem right now is you need a pretty full-blown machine shop and access to lots of materials to make the machines. That's fine for industrialized countries, but if you want to help mechanize the developing world, you are probably better off making a tractor which can be kitbashed from a Toyota Hilux.
What they ought to be focusing on is the "API" - a standard spec for attaching X to Y. A POSIX for PTOs, if you will, but for more parts than just the PTO. A standard rubric for machines and accessories across the farm, like Morse taper but wider in scope.
Regardless, I'd love to see that program get an infusion of cash and talent, and get a full tractor design out the door.
You can't simply copy the existing stuff, because patents. (And software copyright, yeey!)
Even if such a new company enters the market there's no guarantee that parts will be available later. So those new premium priced combines will have their own added risk premium.
And. There's again no guarantee that this new company won't ever "turn to the dark side". So probably farmers' resources are better spent on directly lobbying for "right to repair" policy.
It’s hard to believe John Deere is the only company to buy from, so that leads me to lean towards maybe it’s the best company to buy from? If that’s the case shouldn’t they accept the product as it instead of trying to get legislators to change the rules?
Now, I don't think measuring the effectiveness of those rules, to maintain the efficiency of the market, should have much to do with cardinality, but you're right that just adding more rules to handle edge cases simply leads to a more complex and likely more fragile ecosystem.
> How did one company get so big and change all the rules in farming?
How did all the usual automakers got away with the same copyright/DMCA hard-to-repair shit? Market forces. Race to the bottom.
> It’s hard to believe John Deere is the only company to buy from
Likely there are others, who likely pull the same shit.
> If that’s the case shouldn’t they accept the product as it instead of trying to get legislators to change the rules?
Of course this is a possibility. Or they can start their own company. Or they can ask other established machine manufacturers to venture into farming machinery hoping that that will help. And so on.
But basically what's happening is this group of farmers discovered politics, and they are now trying to persuade society/legislators/regulators/power-brokers to fine tune that "freedom" to include repairability.
Basically it's an economic argument against rent (in the economic sense). Because these buyers argue that they are basically in a quasi-monopolistic market, and thus the profits extracted from them (via these stunts) are a lot higher than they should be.
Of course we can say that who cares, just raise the price of produce, grains, etc... raise the already enormous amount of agriculture subsidies, let John Deere pocket this extra. After all, it's on the stock market, apparently there's no big private stockholders, majority ownership is by a bunch of funds. (There's a ~10% private equity too, it seems.)
Counterfactually we can say that those who did overextend too much died out. Those who are not focused can rarely do well enough to truly cash in on a market. (Is Samsung a good example of this or a good counter-example? Or simply a strange outlier?)
Near as I can figure out, right to repair is really code for I want to bypass the emissions controls on my equipment.
Deere employee, but not speaking for my employer. My opinions are my own.
What exactly do I get, as a consumer, from not being able to swap an ECU for a different one myself? What is the benefit for which I would be paying the premium?
I have never seen right to repair be framed as trying to bypass emissions. Especially considering the content of TFA and the fact that it also applies to consumer electronics and such. What makes you say that it is?
Of course not. Nobody with any intelligence will admit that is their real intent. That would be political suicide.
Just limit contributions to x dollars (indexed to % of poverty level or whatever) to persons that can vote.
This takes away the personhood of corporations and takes care of moneyed interests.
However this would require a constitutional amendment in order to not come in conflict with free speech.
Alternatively, you could make elections outcomes somewhat random, and effectively rendering the prize (officeholding) a lot more uncertain and therefore, not worth the risk.
Imagine winning a campaign for state senate and getting swapped with the 2nd place ranked for comptroller.
Who's going to put money in that campaign
And the more I think about it, the less of an answer I have. This primarily affects farming states, which are in a really good position to pass laws that force manufacturers to either comply or leave the state. California has had good success doing this with other things (e.g. emissions standards), and farming is a niche enough category that JD can't afford to just ignore an entire state of farmland.
I don't live in such a state. I know some of the story, but it's not my problem and it's a bit presumptuous for me to step in and assume that I understand it well enough to solve it. Federal legislation usually does a bad job of solving the original problem anyways, after all of the sides are done negotiating over it. Far better for the farmers of Nebraska to directly appeal to their state legislators and get a bill that truly addresses the issue.
Cuz I got a brand new combine harvester
An' I'll give you the key
Come on now let's get together
In perfect harmony
I got twenty acres
An' you got forty-three
Now I got a brand new combine harvester
An' I'll give you the key
I actually read the FTC report and it doesn’t actually offer a good argument on this point, concluding only that “further research is required” to see if consumers would be willing to make trade offs for better repairability.[1]
[1] https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/documents/reports/nixing-fi...
Maybe a tiiiiiiiny bit more compact, but definitely not more durable. Frame.work can apparently produce easily serviceable, rather thin designs of laptops that are even modular (www.youtube.com/watch?v=0rkTgPt3M4k). This is way thinner than my 2008 era HP and thinner than my 2021 era Lenovo.
As far as phones go, the PCBs are a tiny part of the phone (The cpu, ram, storage combined are less than 1/2 of the phone surface area and probably less than 1/4 of the volume) so gluing them together doesn't even get you much. You might get a _small_ bit by soldering in the battery in the sense that you then don't need a "box" for the removable battery, but that is a small amount of space compared to the battery itself.
They generally keep their phones in large cases to get the size back up
The song itself is a parody/adaption of the Melanie song "Brand New Key" ("I got a brand new pair of roller skates, you got a brand new key"): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iivxuz3dB8k
The song is featured prominently in an iconic scene involving said farming equipment (CW: mild spoilers and splatstick gore): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-8dMlkGKoZE
(diegetically the song is played back from an audio cassette labelled "motivational farming music" in Welsh)
As someone who follows Tesla closely, it is destroying my trust in the media. This line would lead you believe that Tesla does this on a regular basis. I know that's not the case. If you click the link it's referring to an isolated incident that involves a single largely anonymous person (alec). So it makes me question the whole article.
This story is also anecdotal... does anyone know if this really even a problem? If it were, it sounds like an opportunity for a competitor to make a simple to repair harvester.
It doesn’t matter to me that Tesla has only done it once (that we know of), the thing that is disturbing is the capability of Tesla to do this.
The fact that vehicle functionality can be locked behind a Boolean column in the Tesla database is itself the thing that is problematic and disturbing.
And the article in this instance seems accurate, in that they were referring to the capability for Tesla to do this (by pointing at an extant example), rather than claiming that Tesla had a widespread issue of abusing this functionality.
> It's what enables Tesla to turn off features that it doesn't think certain users should have
the misleading part is the phrase "doesn't think certain users should have" it sounds like it's at tesla's discretion but in fact they are referring to a single accident.
I’m not sure I understand the “but in fact”, qualifier because the example that you point to exactly demonstrates that Tesla has the capability to make these changes at their discretion.
It sounds like it’s that way because it is!
Tesla has the capability to turn off features at their discretion, by altering a row in the database.
So…yes, if Tesla doesn’t think a user should have a capability that’s managed remotely, they update a database row (that they have exclusive control over), and that vehicle no longer has that capability.
The statement still reads as totally accurate to me.
The typical use is not malicious (oh, this free trial is now over, so disable that capability), but that’s still a demonstration of Tesla remotely disabling a feature that they don’t think a certain user should have.
My objection is to the capability, rather than a pattern of malicious use. I think the article was correct to point out the capability, and did so by relying on a well known example.
To me, I didn’t read it as an implication that this inaccurate remote disabling was a widespread problem for Tesla but I understand if you read it differently.
It could have read...
"It's what enabled Tesla to once accidentally turn off a feature for a user."
This would still make your point... that they have the capability, but wouldn't be misleading.
Tesla responded by downgrading his firmware remotely, locking his vehicle from future upgrades, and disabling the car's ethernet port.
To me, it seems the downsides generally outweigh the benefits, but I totally agree that its something people need to individually weigh up the pros and cons.
https://www.bmw.co.uk/en/shop/en/shop/ls/dp/Base_CarPlay_gb
It also seems that (after an extremely cursory Google) you can indeed retrofit a BMW Head Unit to enable CarPlay in older unsupported models.
https://www.bimmer-tech.net/blog/item/49-how-to-retrofit-car...
Are you sure it was a BMW you were driving?
I don't think the fact that BMW _now_ offers it for _some_ cars (and most importantly, not for my car) disproves my point that automotive companies should be more willing to retrofit parts for you OR offer them via paid software upgrades instead of encouraging you to purchase a whole new vehicle
No it wouldn't. You're over-reading it. And yes this capability is a real problem.
As a consequence, though, the initial price of the equipment is going to go up. And then they'll be complaining that they can't even afford to get started.
I honestly think they should be able to get it repaired wherever they want. But it's not actually going to fix all their problems, it's just going to shift them around.
What would be the arguments for this price increase?
Because if they are factoring in servicing into the price of the equipment, then I think that would be even more serious case of planned obsolescence (if we can even use that term here...). Maybe then someone will pick up that inefficiency and develop a new brand of affordable equipment - if the US gov. would allow that of course.
One of the questions is how profitable is the manufacturing, sell, and maintenance of farm equipment (for example)? Maybe some of the wallets redistribute between buyers, sellers, and maintenance firms - maybe not if the economics are poor. If the profits were to come mostly from maintenance, then pricing could not just stay where it is (absent new market entries creating downward pressure).
I just can't wrap my head around that.
I mean, if that was the case then probably asset depreciation/wear should be reframed in accounting/finance, because not only they lose value but they have a added cost (arguably planned, since it's part of the pricing structure and business model of that equipment).
In the end you're just paying to rent parts that will need to be replaced and paid for, because the equipment won't work without it and they can only be serviced by X player... farming equipment became just extremely large printers, where buy them cheaper to then get looted on refills?
> I just can't wrap my head around that.
How do you think the automobile industry works? Supposedly most dealerships make their money in the service centre.
With complex modern machinery, maintenance and repair is something that really matters (downtime costs money) and depending on the equipment, it is something where the manufacturer has a real edge, for example, in large industrial machinery. Not talking about some trivial upkeep here.
The asset depreciation/wear side would only be with the buyer, not the seller. So if the buyer where show a balance sheet, then maybe there is something to argue about - not sure what farms do or don't do from an accounting perspective (or need to do). Not everyone needs a balance sheet drawn up.
This is not too dissimilar from selling a gaming console at a loss/at cost and making the money on the games, I reckon.
That's why documentation, schematics, software should be accessible by anyone who wants to fix this type of equipment. It's the difference between a mechanic going up to your farm, plug the equipment to the PC, run the diagnostic, replace part, instead of you have to call a truck, pay for the shipping of the equipment to the closest authorized dealer, and then have it looked up -> this second options costs way more time/money.
But if things are getting so complex you need to haul equipment that weight tons back to the factory, then is that complexity sustainable at all?
However, for some machinery (might not be in farming) it will need real training so even with schematics, docs etc. we do not want untrained people to fix it. These people might not work for the manufacturer, but repairing is "gated" in a sense (repairing commercial aircraft, for example). As far as onsite vs. shipping is concerned, I think with really heavy equipment most maintenance will be onsite as shipping makes no sense at some point/transport is next to impossible.
If the business were profitable without the lock-in, other players would be competing with John Deere on this. Nobody is, that tells me the lock-in is needed to sustain the business.
Corporate lobbying groups funded by large corporations exert massive control and influence over the US government at the state and federal level. They often write large sections of the bills that are ultimately passed and they fund the campaigns of the politicians they are attempting to influence and often provide them with jobs once their political careers are over. Regulatory capture is very much alive and well. As long as lobbyists have so much influence politicians will continue to use groups like family farmers and individual soldiers as political / advertising illusions while pumping money into the groups belonging to the men behind the curtain, massive corporate farms and defense contractors. This plays out over most large industries, tech included.
So ultimately the farmer will be paying for it.
Because you want to invest in your business? So that, once it's paid off, you can stop giving part of your profits to someone else? You know, the old 7-year-payoff rule of thumb? That old chestnut?
This is the problem with most industries in our over-capitalized system now. In every sector, large companies are trying to monopolize at least a horizontal -- if not an entire segment -- so that they can extract rent from the market forever. The very notion that people are allowed to own things, and not pay service fees till the end of their life, is utterly vanishing, from huge farm machinery to freaking light bulbs. Letting companies permanently insert themselves into our daily use of their products is a total change of mindset, and one which people over 40 will probably never be comfortable with.
There's something fundamentally opposed to the idea of a free society when you have a dozen companies requiring constant access to your homes and appliances and cars and personal electronics at all times, in order to keep them running in any useful way. Beyond simple monopolization, every company is doing it. This is quickly leading to an almost collusive situation where there are entire product categories are becoming exclusively IoT devices, with soon-to-follow subscription fees, and there will be no other practical alternatives.
That is a factor, but there are counters. You miss out on whatever advances next year's model has. The machine won't last forever, so even after it is paid off you only get a few years before you have to buy a new one (or put major rework into the old one - often this isn't worth the labor costs since you don't get the scale of an assembly line)
In the end each farmer has to make their own decision. Some will buy the equipment, some will lease it, and some will hire someone else to do that work. There are trade offs. Many accountants have run numbers and discovered that the obvious choice is the worst possible one, but this is a case by case analysis.
I get that you want to say "it depends," but the original context is a TRACTOR. Something that, historically, can easily last 20 years, if not 50.
I wouldn't. That's why farming equipment used to be modularized - the drive unit would be in constant use around the farm, the add-ons were job-specific. With more expensive and infrequently-used equipment, someone would buy one and then lend it out to everyone in the village in turn, or offer using it as a service.
If manufacturers want to step into that last line of business, well, that's a separate topic from right-of-repair, and mostly boiling down to how much are we willing to allow a corporation to tax users after the fact. Me owning and lending out a repairable, DRM-free harvester combine, vs. me lending out a DRMed combine, vs. manufacturer lending their combines directly to users differ primarily in the amount of operational money that goes to the manufacturer instead of staying within the local economy.
(That, and the amount of money farmers have to pay in total. I can harvest your field for the price of a crate of beer and you welding a fence for my chickens. John Deere will only accept hard currency.)
Regardless, keeping machines unrepairable is only adding inefficiency to the process - for which, as far as I'm aware, the manufacturer does not pay. If they want to provide "tractors as a service", perhaps they should be forced to go all in, and provide SLAs. When they're facing a choice between spending $100k to parachute a technician into the middle of nowhere, or spending $100k to reimburse for a lost harvest, perhaps they'll be more receptive to the idea of letting people repair their own things.
(That, or Zipline will start getting inquiries about flying tractor parts back and forth via drones.)
Not all machinery is equally shareable, though. I think for a combined harvester there are two challenges:
(a) Can you move them around the world easily enough so that the costs actually can be shared by multiple users? Or will the payback period just become super long and everyone is happy with that?
(b) From a policy maker perspective, do you want to rely on a supply chain for the full equipment on critical food infrastructure? What if all the harvesters are stuck in some channel?
This is also what makes withholding a repair key so pernicious, as they have you over a barrel, since your productive window with the equipment is also limited.
B5 Passat - dealer only for brake pads/discs - when the car needed a clutch replacement the cost was one of the reasons why I traded it for a Corolla.
There should be viable non OEM parts market.
VW (and others such as some Jeep) uses an electronic parking brake which requires a scan tool to command the ECU to enter maintenance mode in order to retract the electronic motor on the rear axle to allow the piston to retract.
You can do this at home if you have a scan too. If you do not have a scan tool it is still possible to do it manually by disconnecting and removing the EPB servo and manually retracting, but it tricky and not recommended.
They use triple square fasteners on the bracket, and are typically a pain in the ass for this make.
Is there something else I'm missing?
The classic 'Mini' had it just about right: what isn't on there can't break or fall off.
They usually serve to allow for automatic roll-away protection. On new Jeep Latitudes they come on automatically when the vehicle senses you have the vehicle running and are stopped, with the door open, or neutral. Owners like the hand holding ... it's a Jeep thing.
It does increase the price a little bit and if you do not have an OBDII scan tool and need to buy one. If you operate the EPB maintenance mode very incorrectly it is possible to damage the EPB mechanism. They're pretty easy to operate and replace if you know what you're doing.
I've done a few thousand on the e-bike now and it is only getting used more and more. Car trips are now anything in really bad weather, long distance or with more cargo than the bike can take.
The labor for a replacement clutch replacement is typically pretty high. I think the book time for the clutch job on a b5 is really long, something like 10 hours.
While I do love Toyota this is simply not true. Pads for the B5 Passat start at $25 at Autozone.
There absolutely are cars for which it is difficult to get some aftermarket parts but this isn't a good example.
Old Land Rovers, late 70s onwards, are a dream to get parts for. At least from the UK, and given you can live with aftermarket parts.
Dorman (USA) makes a lot of these kits, you can often get all sorts of surprising parts from them, but they sell out their runs, too.
Thing about that kind of part is there aren't a lot of sales. There usually isn't millions of people out there ready to buy the weatherstripping, so the aftermarket often won't do a production run for it as it can be rather unprofitable.
Now and then a supplier will start making something crazy though, a few years ago I was looking for body sheet metal repair parts for a w123 300d--and found them! Uro production body sheet metal was available domestically for this 35year old jalopy.
Can't find the parts anymore I believe (I haven't tried) but there were so many of those w123 and w124 globally that people wanted to glue em' back together. Basically 100% of them have serious rust problems, seems to be mainly because of the way the sunroof is designed. I digress.
Heck, even weatherstripping and carpets are getting available again! Quite expensive so. Still cheaper in some cases then simple repairs in more modern cars. If you can do the work yourself that is.
Pretty sure the situation might have changed now once the model was replaced by the B6/B7 and as the Mk4 Golf aged out of warranty.
The Corolla had after market parts was readily available a few months after I bought it new.
> We see that in design choices like Apple's soldering of RAM to motherboards,
I support lots of ideas behind Right to Repair, but I also think that Apple and other manufacturers sometimes make a serviceability/performance design tradeoff when opting out of socketed memory or CPU. I realize that it can create more waste but I think it shouldn't be constrained.
Software lockouts like the ones described in the article are bad. I like the idea of John Deere and Apple being forced to provide service manuals or critical service/repair software. But I also don't want this to become San Bernardino shooter 2.0. The service tools shouldn't be able to subvert things like Trustzone/Secure Enclave.
So if the tractor works, it generates money for the manufacturer.
If the tractor fails, the manufacturer would be charged - say - $1000 per day.
This way the user would not care if the tractor works or not. If it works, they make $1000 from hay. If it does not, they get $1000 from the manufacturer.
Even if the manufacturer is not interested in this business model, it could be provided by a third party. Either as an insurance against non-working equipment or as a full service by a company that buys the tractor and provides it under the "pay for the value of the service" model.
[0]https://www.extremetech.com/computing/246314-farmers-piratin...
But if it’s (likely) John Deere, we avoid them like the plague. Granted, my family’s farm is “hobby farm” scale. I see plenty of Deere’s on actual farms. But for me, it’s not worth it.
I’ve been half a mile into brush at quarter to midnight fixing a Kubota with very basic hand tools. I have a repair manual that shows how to service every part. It’s how it SHOULD be done. Most people who rely on a tractor don’t have time to mess around with John Deer concierge any time they hit a bump the wrong way.
It's a fucked up future we are looking at.
The source code to the software doesn't help much. It doesn't document design decisions that can relate to electrical or mechanical properties of the device.
I am not agaist a right to repair in general, but what I want to see is pretty strict regulation that repairs to potentially hazardous devices may only be performed by trained professionals. E.g. the brakes in your car would be off limits anyone except a licensed mechanic. But manufacturers would have to supply documentation, tools and spare parts to any qualified mechanic, not just their own dealerships.
If you don't want people tampering with the ECU or ABS controller (if the vehicle has ABS) then I get that. But a blanket statement like "average joe can't touch the brakes" is horribly ignorant.
On my car: remove 5x 19mm lugnuts, remove wheel, reinstall 2x lug nuts, remove 2x 21mm caliper assembly bolts, remove the caliper assembly, use a 4" C-clamp over the existing used inner brake pad to retract the caliper piston, replace pads, reinstall caliper assembly, reinstall 21mm bolts to secure caliper assembly to steering knuckle, remove 2x lug nuts, reinstall wheel, install 5x lug nuts torqued to 85ft/lb.
Need to swap rotor? It's only secured by 2 of those lugnuts, so just do it then.
What's dangerous? It will not allow you to do it wrong because parts will not fit. You need exactly two sockets: 21mm and 19mm.