&gt; Those buying new don&#x27;t care about repairs.Yes because thy live in the John Deere future. This was not always the case, surely. You used to be able to take high school classes to learn how to fix a combustion engine, even a new one!

That&#x27;s not true for commercial users the way it is for private cars.Even if you have a service contract you&#x27;re still gonna be pissed at the downtime cost of having a tech drag their ass out to wherever you are to initiate a forced regen or something.

The existence of this startup and their early demand seems to refute your point.

&gt; Those buying new don&#x27;t care about repairs.huh, why not?

You&#x27;re pretty confident for someone who fundamentally does not understand the issue. During harvest season even hours of delay can be disastrous for farms that are barely solvent in the first place. When your only option is to call the dealer and hope and pray they deign to visit your farm in a timely fashion it doesn&#x27;t matter how good the warranty is or is not. Farmers need to be self sufficient because time is money and money is survival.

Those buying new don&#x27;t care about repairs. They were never going to do the warrantee work themselves anyway. Those buying on the used market have more reason to care about repairs, but used buyers are beholden to what new buyers purchased in the past.

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 love that the 5.9 lives onursa-ag.com For (a little bit) more info

Agreed. Hopefully something materializes but who knows. These tractors actually exist.

What Slate is hyping that they&#x27;ll do with small trucks.We&#x27;ll see what, if anything, actually becomes available.

The market for used tractors went through the roof years ago--20 to 40 year old tractors with tens of thousands of miles on them sell for not so far from new prices because farmers value being able to fix them without paying $$$

This is pretty cool! Kinda similar to what Slate is doing with cars.

My guess is that this is a direct response to all the claw stuff running on macs. I used to never get cf captchas from a mac + home IP (while getting plenty on my linux ws + work vpn). Now i&#x27;ve gotten 2 sites in the past week that not only show the captcha, but also loop once I click the human thing. Most likely mac + resIP is not a good signal anymore...

I occasionally get those loop even on chrome.

Worked for me just now on mobile safari. You get the cloudflare human test but I just clicked the box and was in. This was despite accessing the site while vpn’d from home and using multiple adblockers.

Maybe it’s the blocking of 3rd party cookies, because I experience similar issues with Chrome on desktop from time to time.

Mobile Safari has been giving me a complete loop on these in the past couple months, I have to switch browsers to get through. Anyone else?

Here&#x27;s an alternative source:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.thedrive.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;new-tractor-with-12-valve-cummins-and-zero-electronics-goes-back-to-the-basics" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.thedrive.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;new-tractor-with-12-valve-cumm...</a>

I don&#x27;t have that _particular_ problem, but I often gripe about how no website seems to be able to remember that I&#x27;ve used this device before ...... and only briefly pause to wonder if it&#x27;s because of all the anti-cookie, anti-tracking stuff in Safari.

Non-Chrome browsers constantly require Robot check

I think it&#x27;s aggressive user profiling, so anyone with a hint of privacy is not welcomed. I can&#x27;t imagine this getting any better with Chrome MCP and other tools.

On HN, I often see comments like this, complaining about Cloudflare blocking access to pages. It makes me wonder if it’s due to a particular setup that triggers bot detection – like Tor or no-JS – that HN readers often use, or if Cloudflare has too many false positives.

The other day they blocked me from accessing Kagi&#x27;s web site because I was using Kagi&#x27;s web browser.

Those tests are funny in a way because we as humans have to prove that we’re human to a robot

Well, at least you are not in Spain.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;community.cloudflare.com&#x2F;t&#x2F;website-inaccessible-from-spain-possible-regional-block-on-cloudflare-ips&#x2F;883954" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;community.cloudflare.com&#x2F;t&#x2F;website-inaccessible-from...</a>

Cloudflare is increasingly a problem in terms of blocking huge geographic regions, often without the website operators even being aware this is happening. All in the name of &quot;security.&quot;

Yeah, I also wanted to comment on this, though I think it’s technically against the rules.I hit this first on my VPN, so I disconnected, then got asked again from my home wifi. I dunno why I look like a bot to Cloudflare. I hate these prompts and it’s too bad they’re all over the web.

Coming soon:This article requires Age Verification. Please hold up your passport to the sensor on your device to continue.

Try a browser MCP and ask it to bypass the captcha. Works for me most of the time

I second this. Clownflare is agressively blocking:
Fennec v149.0.2 - Germany

&quot;The myth of consensual website use&quot;User: &quot;I consent&quot;Website: &quot;I consent&quot;Cloudflare: &quot;I don&#x27;t&quot;Isn&#x27;t there someone you forgot to ask?

Thank you Cloudflare for making it impossible to read news, and yes I am a human.

Sounds like Gliders (truck) though those are usually to avoid emissions requirements.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Glider_%28automobiles%29#Glider_truck" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Glider_%28automobiles%29#Glide...</a>

You may want to check out Siromer tractors depending where you are. Similar idea.

Can you share more about your hobby farm? I would love to learn more about how you got into that? My family had a small farm growing up and my parents are still actively working on the farm everyday and I would like to take that up at some point. So curious to hear what you farm and how much involved you are in the process.

If you&#x27;re mechanically inclined, the compacts of yesterdecade are still out there. Popular brands like Ford or Massey Ferguson have amazingly good supply chain for 50 year old models. I run my hobby farm with a 1975 MF135, and I just sold a 1947 Massey Harris Pony that ran like a top doing pasture&#x2F;arena dragging duties. I&#x27;ve put a ton of hours on the 135 and only done basic maintenance like replacing a few hydraulic lines and changing fluids.

Yeah though about the snow plow market in rural areas.I wonder about a hybrid version of this though, maybe Edison motors should collab

I have a Kubota L3010 HST (late &#x27;90s-early &#x27;00s) and it&#x27;s fantastic. Fuel efficient, quiet, comfortable, minimal electronics, pretty easy to work on. It&#x27;s a little underpowered (30hp&#x2F;24 pto hp), but not egregiously. It&#x27;ll run a 9&quot; post auger or chip 6&quot; logs if you feed them slowly enough. I&#x27;ll have to split it this summer, unfortunately, it&#x27;s developing a hydraulic leak from the clutch housing which almost certainly means the front driveshaft seal is failing.

Wish they sold something in the compact utility segment. 40-60hpish. I&#x27;d love an affordable Canadian made tractor for property maintenance &#x2F; smaller farms.(Though these days I&#x27;ve love something electric. I don&#x27;t need long run time, I&#x27;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 &#x2F; &quot;smart&quot; tractor stuff which I don&#x27;t care about.)

This is what a &quot;bobcat&quot; has become for UGV startups. It&#x27;s a low tech proven platform that you can basically modify with attachments to do a lot of UGV work.

And how many acres are you farming on it? Today&#x27;s world of agriculture is much higher tech-based (for many good reasons, primarily yield) than back in the horse and buggy days of farming.

I still got a farmall 230, super easy to fix and maintain and works perfect for my small bit of land. An electric starter addon is really nice for winter starts though instead of killing your arm.

i have a farmall hand cranked tractor, going on 90 years old, so far its been rubber parts, and clutch pads.as far as auto mation goes, thats how implements used to work. it was a tracter&#x2F;thresher&#x2F;combine. then a bale counter is slapped on then maybe row sighting or guidance, etc.if your really snazzy, the implement is actually mapping the soil for moisture, or rough composistion and holding data to use in reformulating or notating your current cultural plans, i.e. supplemental spot feeding and irrigation.actual agricultural needs, not just fluff.

I was assuming the same. This might be fine for a small setup but I&#x27;d imagine all the digitization shenanigans was done so efficiency could increase. I imagine for large scale operations this would be like replacing your steam engine with a horse.

Whoa there, M{r,s}. Socialist! Can’t have any of our democratic infrastructure near that crazy idea!  (&#x2F;s)

Whoops, I hope you are not a naturalized citizen of the US.

Could even nationalise the base tractor factory...

This is the way if we can ensure manufacturing of the parts. It won’t catch on but it would be awesome to have “base” tractors that are mechanical and predictable. Then you slap on whatever software on top that helps (automation, etc). But they need to be decoupled imo.

Ultimately the “lock in” boils down to “when this breaks someone has to pay to fix it”. Automation and tech makes the galaxy of things that can break much larger, and the pinpointing of “who should pay to fix this” much harder. “Lock in” feels like an attempt to simplify toward “only we can fix it”, with the downsides of cost and time.

Exactly. Electronically controlled unit injectors are expensive--like 10x the price of mechanical ones. They&#x27;re super cool, they can produce like 10 separate metered injection events per cycle. This is great for efficiency, noise, emissions, etc. But I can rebuild mechanical injectors with a bottle jack pop tester I made from $100 worth of parts and a bench vise. There&#x27;s no wiring harness, no computer.. If the injector is getting fuel, has decent spray pattern, and is popping at the right pressure I know for certain the fuel system is good. With an electronic common rail system I need some expensive proprietary computer equipment to diagnose it, and there&#x27;s no way I can build a test bench to rebuild those injectors.

You need electronics and computers for cost-effective compliance with emissions requirements. Emissions limits have been one of the most positive government policies in my lifetime, saving millions of QALYs.There&#x27;s lots of other electronics in most modern vehicles, but the public manufacturer rationales for electronic lockdowns almost always point back to emissions concerns because they&#x27;re so defensible. How do you separate them?

That’s part of the issue. But packing a tractor (or car) with electronics and computers does make it inherently harder to work on—even if it’s not locked down.

The tech is inherently more expensive though. So if you want to undercut on price you have to cut costs somewhere.

Reminds me of how I don’t ever want an infotainment system in my car.  I want the peripherals: a touch screen and speakers.   I’ll supply my own phone to do the rest.

This is probably not this companies vision but it does seem interesting if companies sell &quot;dumb&quot; machines and then consumers can BYO electronics. Like an agricultural version of comma.ai.Not sure how much appetite there is for that but half price + 5 grand in off the shelf electronics seems like something margin sensitive farmers would do.

What if an OEM did the IBM thing and published open specs and software, spawning a whole industry? It&#x27;s a shame the incentives don&#x27;t seem to be there for it.

Ever-more-restrictive government regulations are what allows these OEMs to ‘leverage’ their market power this way. I am not sure that a new regulation can solve it, as these sorts of mandates don’t seem to have worked in any other market.

Now is especially a good time for Canada to do it. Cory Doctorow had a fantastic CBC interview about this. Scrapping anti-tampering protections would harm anti-Canadian tech companies while also building rapport with American farmers who would be able to use Canadian software on their tractors.

There&#x27;s no magic necessary. TFA highlights the exact mechanism by which markets can fill a gap or need via entrepreneurship when incumbents fail to deliver what customers want. It&#x27;s not guaranteed to happen or work in every case, but there&#x27;s money to be made by giving people what they actually want.

Government regulations weren&#x27;t necessary for Framework to make the most open laptop product line in history which includes a the &#x27;Pro&#x27; 13&quot; laptop chassis which is both backwards and forwards compatible with components that were sold 5 years ago on day 1.

Honestly do you even need to build a lowtech alternative?  Just anounce you will and retire on cartel kickbacks to slow it down?

&gt; instead of believing in magic of &quot;free market&quot;It looks like magic because it works like magic. Surprisingly it is also possible to believe in the magic of &quot;government intervention&quot; though it looks less like magic and more like unintended consequences.

OEM can change their mind at any moment and there is always going to be an MBA rubbing their hands together thinking about all the money that can be made.This needs to be solved at government level with right to repair laws and requirement for open standards instead of believing in magic of &quot;free market&quot;.

And there&#x27;s also a place for OEMs who make the bare machines like this, and other people sell electronics to add!

Maybe not inherently bad, but clearly not inherently necessary or useful if they&#x27;re already getting so many inquiries from farmers. Could just be that the tech doesn&#x27;t offer enough meaningful value when the core mechanical functionality can be achieved at a lower price.

This was my take as well. How many 3rd parties might be able to bring on upgrades&#x2F;modifications to a &quot;dumb&quot; tractor to make it smart vs only being able to buy a &quot;smart&quot; tractor from one vendor and be forced into it&#x27;s rules&#x2F;restrictions&#x2F;prices

There are already open source auto pilot and cruise control implementations for cars. (Not all cars are supported obviously!) so to have this in place for tractors off the road seems very doable.Edit: specifically thinking of <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;comma.ai&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;comma.ai&#x2F;</a>

Well open source AutoSteer exists it has a lot of features like rate control built in to it. The system is called AgOpenGPS it’s very popular for retrofitting older equipment with modern technology.

The beauty here is even beyond experimentation the tech will change repeatedly over the life of the equipment, and you can cheaply adapt to that. There is very little advantage to the modern tractors, beyond luxuries and the finish of a self contained package. Farmers rarely ime prioritize either of these

Years ago, there was a TED Talk[0] from the guy that started Open Source Ecology[1]. The TED Talk was really cool, but I haven&#x27;t really followed what they did. It sounded promising to have open-source technology for use in this space.[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=S63Cy64p2lQ" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=S63Cy64p2lQ</a>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;wiki.opensourceecology.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Main_Page" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;wiki.opensourceecology.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Main_Page</a>

They have no driving electronics, electronic throttle, ECU controlled injection etc, so you are limited, you can&#x27;t for example easily make it go constant set speed, because the throttle isn&#x27;t electronic.It went a bit too far, optimum would be modern enough to have drive by wire but with open ECU and documentation

With high end tractors you can have them drive themselves on the rows based on a GPS map that was created when you planted.  That&#x27;s going to be difficult to retrofit.

My bet would be there will be a niche for these tractors at hobby farms but the reality is outside of niche goods and hobby farms, farming is about scale and the machines that companies like JD sell help a lot. Sure the tech is locked down but at the scale those players are running at it’s baked into the service contract to minimize downtime.

I would be surprised if this doesn&#x27;t exist already in some nascent form?This is an area where you would probably need entire ecosystem of systems that are onboard tractors, but also for the various implements you hook up to it to monitor sowing, fertilizing, spraying etc. Including backend systems that you can either self-host or subscribe to some service that doesn&#x27;t have awful terms.It shouldn&#x27;t take immense amount of capital to make some real progress towards something that can make a difference.

&gt; However, the tech exists for a reason and is not inherently bad, the issue is the lock-in, the lack of choice and interoperability.These low-tech tractors could become a hot bed for open source experimentation. Nothing stopping someone from sticking a tablet on the dash. You could run GPS harvesting optimization software or some webthing locally. Could be cloud or clever DiY farmers could run their farm off a local instance on a small machine using a WiFi AP atop the barn or whatever.

My in-laws use a Farm-all H around the yard for a lot of tasks. I don’t know what year it was made, but it looks like they were made from 1939-1954. It just… runs. We basically just do oil changes on it.

I disagree. While those are great points, I don&#x27;t think that&#x27;s the primary reason -- and maybe we&#x27;re actually saying the same thing.This tractor will last 50 years (and maybe more). Your grandchildren will be able to still use it. That longevity is the primary reason farmers would be super interested in this.Some jobs (like mucking a barn for example) don&#x27;t require a high-tech tractor. Sometimes you just need a workhorse that you can trust will start, run and do the job. Every single time. I still see farmers running old minneapolis-moline tractors from 100 years ago!

For the farmers I know the price tag is the first thing they were looking at.  So much grumbling about how Deere is using software to egregiously pad the price tag.  Looking at a tractor that is going to take 5 or 6 years to pay off instead of 15 is tempting.  Sadly Trump is absolutely going to slap a 400% tariff on these if they are even allowed to be imported.

The fact tractor isn&#x27;t locked in means 3rd party equipment have a chance instead of having to sit in locked in garden of a given vendor.Not sure they needed to go all the way to mechanical injection tho, this is just literally burning money away

Do you work in the agricultural industry? Farm equipment is expensive, farmers will maintain the equipment as long as possible, which is a long time. Manufactures such as John Deere have tried to make it not possible for farmers to do self repair.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;EPYy_g8NzmI" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;EPYy_g8NzmI</a>

There&#x27;s some nuance here. If you care about fuel consumption or emissions, then EFI is the current best way to reduce both, and that requires &quot;computers and software&quot; to operate on the timescales required. I put scare quotes around those terms because you can do EFI on an Arduino, which is at least an order of magnitude more powerful than what automakers shipped in the 80s.In any case, EFI gives you more control over the engine and vastly simplifies the overall product. I don&#x27;t know if you&#x27;ve seen the mechanical fuel-injection pumps used by tractor diesels; they are basically tiny engines unto themselves, with their own little block and camshaft [0]. There is an entire world of diesel performance modding with a subset of it dedicated to modifying the Bosh P1700 mechanical fuel-injection pump to change timings, handle higher RPMs, and run higher pressures. I would not call it, or its carburetor cousin in the gasoline world, &quot;simple&quot; compared to computer-controlled fuel delivery.An open-source ECU project, on the other hand, enabled a hacker to implement Koenigsegg&#x27;s Freevalve tech on a Miata [1].[0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blessedperformance.com&#x2F;ddp-cummins-hot-street-p-pump-for-1994-to-1998-dodge-5-9l-cummins&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blessedperformance.com&#x2F;ddp-cummins-hot-street-p-pump...</a>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=E9KJ_f7REGw" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=E9KJ_f7REGw</a>

&gt; However, the tech exists for a reason and is not inherently bad, the issue is the lock-in, the lack of choice and interoperability.The problem is computers and software enable lock-in, because of their flexibility and communications capability. Get rid of them, and you make lock-in much more difficult (or even impossible if you use &quot;standard&quot; parts).Also, computers and software are complex, and that complexity is not physically visible. If you want something you can completely understand, it&#x27;s probably a good choice to simplify by cutting them out completely.

Note that that OEM would still have to deal with the minefield of patents created by the John Deere&#x27;s of the world. I once worked for a company that had to work around an electronic circuit patent to detect a pulse. That was it, that was all it did. But if you used a standard differentiator circuit to detect the pulse created by a optical sensor watching for falling seeds you would violate the patent.So a prerequisite might involve fixing the patent system...

third outcome:3. JD buys them, competition works, others notice they can just &quot;build a tractor that&#x27;s simple&quot;, and suddenly there are more competitors to choose from. JD still can&#x27;t compete, and can&#x27;t buy them all...or operate on small margins.

Unfortunately it&#x27;s doomed as soon as you read &quot;startup&quot;. Why? There are two possible outcomes:1. This fails, goes away and we&#x27;re back where we started; or2. They take the bag and sell to John Deere, who then locks down the tractors in the same way to force you to buy support, official parts and so on. And that&#x27;ll happen. It&#x27;s a bait-and-switch so somebody can get rich.The only solution to this is collective ownership or some other non-profit structure so a handful of owners can&#x27;t sell out and cash in.Look to Spain&#x27;s Mondragon Corporation [1] for inspiration.[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.newyorker.com&#x2F;business&#x2F;currency&#x2F;how-mondragon-became-the-worlds-largest-co-op" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.newyorker.com&#x2F;business&#x2F;currency&#x2F;how-mondragon-be...</a>

&gt; Farmers have always done as much of their own maintenance as possible.Well, sure. Maintenance is an off-season job. Its that or sit on the couch watching TV, so you may as well be in the shop getting equipment ready. Even if it takes you longer than an experienced tech, does it really matter? Not really. The winters are long.Repairs are a different story. When things break, you need it fixed now. Wasting a day trying to figure out how to separate complex, seized parts from each other isn&#x27;t time you have. You&#x27;re going to be hiring a mechanic who has done it a million times before.Of course, more important than who does the work is part availability. Having the human capacity to get something fixed means nothing if you cannot also get the parts you need. I&#x27;ve certainly been caught more than once needing to wait a week on a part, which is not a fun place to be. And this is where John Deere has focused their business: Doing more to keep parts available near to where the farmers are, so that you can get parts exactly when you need them. This is, above all else, why John Deere is the market leader.&gt; Farmers who want advanced capabilities might now look to build them on top of no-tech tractors with open-source solutionsI have been going down this road and am starting to regret it a bit. The saving grace is that I have found enjoyment in building a system of my own. But if I found it to be a chore, at this point I&#x27;d have deep remorse that I didn&#x27;t just pay someone like John Deere for a fully delivered, highly polished solution. I know the HN crowd tends towards the DIY, but, having actual experience here, I don&#x27;t see this happening outside of the small subset of farmers who find fun in it. It is a decent hobby for those so inclined, but from a purely commercial perspective the time and effort can be better put to use elsewhere.

&quot;Downtime — the thing that actually costs a farmer money during planting or harvest — shrinks dramatically when you don’t need a factory technician with a laptop to diagnose a fuel delivery problem.&quot;---------------Tractors aren&#x27;t cars. It isn&#x27;t merely inconvenient if they are unavailable at crucial times, so ease of repair is critical. Farmers have always done as much of their own maintenance as possible. John Deere has spent a lot of time taking away the reliability and ease of repair that farmers need in order to give them &quot;advanced&quot; features they don&#x27;t need.Farmers who want advanced capabilities might now look to build them on top of no-tech tractors with open-source solutions rather than trusting John Deere again. That way, if the &quot;would be nice&quot; tech has problems they can rip it off and get the harvest in without it.

Just call it what it is, greed. The idiots at John Deer thought strangling their customers to death was a good business model.

More that even if there was suitable replacement, that costs money vs tractor they already have. Those machines are in service for decades

John Deere has lost so much good will among farmers due to their lock-in efforts, it&#x27;s wild.  Unfortunately, many farmers are stuck with them because the only tractor dealership within a reasonable distance is John Deere.

Indeed, my boat has a Yanmar diesel engine from the 1980s. Except for the electrical needs of the starter motor, alternator, and a couple of alarm sensors, Yanmar and other makers of this vintage purposely made these engines to run entirely mechanically.There are no digital controllers and no consequent promises of higher efficiency or reliability. More than one sailor I&#x27;ve talked to see this absence of electronics as a feature. Sailors are wary of gear that&#x27;s difficult to understand.With just a half-decent socket wrench set and a few other common tools, my delicate desk-job hands handle all maintenance tasks and most repairs.

It&#x27;s not only the lock-in, as the document says, its about limiting the downtime.Sailboats have the similar issue:When are are in the middle of the pacific and get an egine problem, you want the engine to be low tech enough to be able to fix, or at least patch, yourself with minimum parts.Yanmar switched its whole lineup of engines to ECU around 2014, but the one without ECU are very much sought after for the above reason.

Software or hardware, the lock-down for dollars will blow back.

&gt;&gt; However, the tech exists for a reason and is not inherently bad, the issue is the lock-in, the lack of choice and interoperability.The marketing excuse for the tech might be features or efficiency, but the reason for the tech is lock-in and minimising product lifetime.The days when manufacturers had friendly, cooperative relationships with their customers are long gone :( Can we bring them back? I hope so, but am not hopeful.

Whom tech benefits is worth keeping in mind.Tech for improvement for customers vs tech for moats&#x2F;enshittification, especially when imposed by one side on the other.The latter is never very good.

If you add a bunch of tech to, well, anything you have to go out of your way to make it not locked down.

It goes much deeper than that. The John Deere ecosystem is designed to trap farmers using a combination of the closed ecosystem and financing. They&#x27;ve been at it for years, selling precision agriculture advances as the thing that will maximize all yields and turn profits, and then following up with economic manipulations to create what amounts to tech-enabled sharecropping.It&#x27;s so bad the FTC and states had to sue Deere over just the right to repair. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ftc.gov&#x2F;news-events&#x2F;news&#x2F;press-releases&#x2F;2025&#x2F;01&#x2F;ftc-states-sue-deere-company-protect-farmers-unfair-corporate-tactics-high-repair-costs" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ftc.gov&#x2F;news-events&#x2F;news&#x2F;press-releases&#x2F;2025&#x2F;01&#x2F;...</a>

The best analogy that I can think of is cruise control on a car.Do you need it? No. Is it nice to have? Yes.The strict &quot;no tech&quot; premise of these tractors feels comparable to someone disabling the cruise control feature on their own car because they read an article about BMW locking heated seats behind a subscription.I don&#x27;t know much about tractors, but I would think that surely there are some modern benefits that these Ursa tractors are missing out?However, the article claims that they&#x27;re selling really well, so maybe at that price point the tradeoffs are still worth it.

I don&#x27;t know anything about tractors but our modern world is full of useless and inherently bad &quot;tech&quot; that only exists for the flashy factor.People are just tired of being mislead and abused by corporations, which is why there is now a market for non-tech products.

I think going bare-metal at cut-rate might&#x27;ve been the only way to actually kick-start that. F.ex. ECU&#x27;s make things more optimal so buyers will be paying extra for fuel in a bad economy, but the lock-down was worse when it was causing downtime.But tech in general is perhaps in a growing-up phase, we had Arduinos and Raspberry PI&#x27;s filling a similar need (computer to electronics being needlessly complicated) that was initially filled from the low-end, but now we have faster SBC&#x27;s and stuff like Framework laptop&#x27;s that is expanding the range of options for repariable&#x2F;replaceable&#x2F;hackable parts up to the high end today and farming equipment is probably destined to get a similar range of options.An interesting note here is, will cars also start getting a range of more hackable options, mechanics are ingenious already but it&#x27;s still very much hacks without manufacturer support, but a new manufacturer providing a low-cost base could very well pop up and grow quickly if they establish an ecosystem.

The typical commercial farmer is going to be no more concerned about the software being locked down than the CEO of a marketing firm is concerned about Adobe products being locked down. It&#x27;s not the core competency. They are using the product of a third-party vendor because they don&#x27;t want to have to deal with it.But technology is expensive. That&#x27;s the play here: To strip the tech so that the tractor can be sold for a fraction of the cost. And for the farmers who don&#x27;t need tech, that might be appealing. They will never win over the farmers who are already buying equipment with all the bells and whistles, but there could be an opportunity to capture those who are still in something 50 years old and are looking to update to an affordable newer machine that isn&#x27;t worn out.Repairability will be the biggest concern for any potential customer. It helps that they&#x27;ve tried to stay as &quot;off-the-shelf&quot; as possible, but the article suggests they struggle to keep parts already and there is no dealer network to see that the parts are sitting where the farmers are located. John Deere is the market leader mostly because they&#x27;ve worked hard to make sure you can get parts as soon as you need them and not have to wait days&#x2F;weeks to have it shipped from across the country&#x2F;world, if they exist at all. The Belarus tractor saga taught farmers the hard lesson of what happens when the machine is cheap to buy but parts are difficult to source long ago.

I think this is a reaction to the incredibly locked down ecosystem that most of these mfgs are pushing.However, the tech exists for a reason and is not inherently bad, the issue is the lock-in, the lack of choice and interoperability.IMO, there is plenty of space for an OEM who can play nice with others, offer an open (and vibrant ecosystem), and keep users coming back by choice, not by lock-in.

Ha - “Wilson saw the gap and drove a tractor through it.”

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.

&quot;From whence this barbarous animus?&quot; tweeted the technologist from the cauldron in which he boiled.

An anti-right to repair bill + a carbon tax (except this time it taxes you for not emitting).

Then again, she probably loves the idea of tractors with poor fuel efficiency and no exhaust cleaning tech.

Danielle Smith knows how to trample curiosity.

Foreseeing (plausible) political takedowns is useful.

&gt; Please don&#x27;t use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.

Yep. She gonna sell out Albertan business interests so fast.

Danielle Smith never met a corporate shill she could say no toI predict 6 months before John Deer gets the Alberta UCP on the line and gets a law passed that bans &quot;unsafe tractors&quot; (or the like)

Shows the attractiveness of “right to repair.” People want to own their stuff and not be forever beholden to the manufacturer.

If the original article is of interest to you, this project might be too:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.opensourceecology.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.opensourceecology.org&#x2F;</a><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;wiki.opensourceecology.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Open_Source_Ecology" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;wiki.opensourceecology.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Open_Source_Ecology</a>

I wonder if this notion comes from the 80s, when engines with turbos had lower compression ratios for reliability. Today&#x27;s turbocharged motors have higher compression ratios than in the malaise era, and the turbos have a lot less lag. Turbos no longer mean you have to sacrifice fuel economy for performance (unless you have a lead foot).

This seems almost completely untrue?The new models have engines that are smaller turbos, that part is true — but they get &gt;30% better fuel economy, and they output more power.The reliability might become an issue down the road especially in hybrid engines but the data so far don’t seem to support your assertions. The one exception is maybe the Tundra 3.4L but that seems to still be ambiguous as to the root cause, and may just be mfg process error.

&gt; No one makes or has made a perfect engine1.9 TDI

tl;dr engines today are not the same as an early 2000s Subaru EJ25 with a massive turbo bolted on.&gt; they overstrain themDebatable. Materials science and engine construction science have advanced significantly since the V6 and V8s of the 1980s and 1990s Toyotas. Almost every auto manufacturer on earth is capable of getting &gt;100hp&#x2F;L out of a gas engine reliably. Toyota is certainly not the only OEM doing this reliably at scale. This stuff is no longer exotic. Gas engines today are designed from the ground up to be turbocharged and direct injected (and in Toyota&#x27;s case, both direct and port injected), and built with the cooling systems to match.&gt; The outcome is a strictly worse engineNo one makes or has made a perfect engine but there&#x27;s a lot of romanticizing engines from the past. These newer engines make more peak torque, their torque curves start much lower in the RPM band and remain more useful through whole rev range, they burn significantly less fuel when not under load, and the hybrid electric drivetrain mean the gas engine spends less of its life idling or lugging at low speeds and high loads. Whether some of these tradeoffs are worth it is debatable, but in no way are these engines &quot;strictly worse&quot;.

&gt; overstrain them, and put huge turbos on the enginesThis doesn&#x27;t really mean anything. You can build an engine at any point of the spectrum from naturally aspirated to turbocharged, to turbo-compound, to actually not having any pistons at all (e.g. the &quot;turbofans&quot; that we put on airliners). What you want is to match the engine to the machine and build it out of the right materials.Most people don&#x27;t know shit about engineering and have weak intuition about materials, stress and physics in general. What the common person thinks about a random engineering topic literally does not matter, because they are 90% wrong about everything. Regarding cars, it&#x27;s more like 99%. People still recite torque figures like they mean anything, ffs. That bad boy with 200 Nm at the crank? Cool, I make 150 Nm pedalling a bike.My previous car before an EV had a 1-litre 3-cylinder engine, a 1.0 TSI. Pure gas, not a hybrid. That&#x27;s an engine that&#x27;s rated for 81kW (it actually delivers a bit more than that) and that can do 60 mpg on country roads (regularly). When it came out in 2015, &quot;car enthusiasts&quot; were laughing hysterically at the idiots who&#x27;d buy the car and have to replace the engine every 2-3 years. 11 years later, the cars are driving around just fine. The 1.0 TSI, just like the entire EA211 family, is a good engine with no major reliability issues.

I&#x27;ve got a 1995 FZJ80 and I am counting the fucking minutes until I can rip that goddamn forklift motor out and replace it with the 1HZ + HX30 + 1HD-T rods mashup I have in store for it :P

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

The irony is cars got screens largely due to the backup camera mandate which was intended to be a safety feature. Governments are very bad at understanding unintended consequences.

I favor my 2018 car with knobs and buttons but has car and android auto and a modern turbo inline 4...just wish it had metal valve covers and coolant joints instead of crappy plastic...

I always thought of it this way: software engineering&#x2F;UI&#x2F;UX to most car companies is a cost center. Something to be minimized, workers to be provided minimal resources and pay. The compensation is not competitive with what you’d find at a tech company, but they’re hiring from the same talent pool.The effect of this is obvious and felt in the end product.

I&#x27;d love this. I really don&#x27;t want my car to be an iPhone with &quot;apps&quot; and random background software on it. The car touchscreen was perhaps the worst design choice in the history of the automobile, and is likely the cause of countless crashes. It&#x27;s insane when I see car UIs that have the &#x27;cancel &#x2F; go back&#x27; button located in DIFFERENT areas depending on the screen context.

I still often think of my old Saab 900’s Black Panel button—physical dark mode.

I honestly don&#x27;t care about power windows (or seats), do you really? I guess one advantage is being able to easily open windows other than your own.Heated seats and stearing wheel, yes please.But yep what I want is a Saab 900 &quot;cockpit&quot; car -- everything can be focused on and manipulated (physically!) without my eyes leaving the road or my hand having to explore too much.But, yeah, electric.

They have plenty of running&#x2F;driving mules out there already:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=L6_9_HHLOSY" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=L6_9_HHLOSY</a>(Not for sale yet though.)

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.crowdsupply.com&#x2F;open-tools&#x2F;open-printer" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.crowdsupply.com&#x2F;open-tools&#x2F;open-printer</a>

it seems like Slate might be trying that but there&#x27;s no real cars from them yet so they&#x27;re just renders at this point. but yes, same concept but printers is my wish.

Another: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.slate.auto&#x2F;en&#x2F;personalization" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.slate.auto&#x2F;en&#x2F;personalization</a> 
A basic truck that you can customize.&gt; BRING YOUR OWN TECH&gt; Bring the apps you know and love to create the experience you want. Instead of a bulky, distracting, and quickly outdated infotainment system, a Slate can come with something simpler: a smartly designed mount that fits a phone or tablet and a holder for a portable Bluetooth speaker. Heating and air conditioning are included, no need to bring your own fan.&gt; Your Slate will age gracefully, because it’ll always have the latest tech—yours.

One example: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.caricecars.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.caricecars.com</a> (via <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=45823186">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=45823186</a>)

Seeing all the gigantic and very-high-priced Pavement Princess Pickups clogging dealer lots, it&#x27;s plain that the auto industry in general didn&#x27;t learn a damn thing. It&#x27;s easy to point fingers in all directions, but it always ends up that we get the worst outcomes.

I wonder if we&#x27;ll see a repeat of what happened in the 60&#x27;s and 70&#x27;s: American car companies didn&#x27;t want to make small and cheap fuel efficient cars, so an upstart (Japanese automakers) came in with exactly that and stole their lunch money.These days, the big foreign manufacturers are all in the same game as the domestic ones - software nonsense. Tariffs are keeping other foreign competition out at the moment, so it&#x27;d have to be a new domestic manufacturer, or an existing one who deviates from the standard auto playbook.

by the looks of it... any front collision == instant death?

$41k doesn&#x27;t sound that cheap to me, for what it is

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.telotrucks.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.telotrucks.com&#x2F;</a> is pretty much thatCheap, fast enough, practical, goofey looking.

I drive a Honda from 2002 and love it. It’s starting to show its age but I don’t want to get a new car until this one dies for good.

Yes or even better something like a Volvo from the 80s

Sounds like you just want a car from the year 2000.

&gt; All the safety features require OEM hardware&#x2F;software that locks you in...I&#x27;m unclear whether you&#x27;re stating the current state of affairs, or arguing that such safety features cannot exist without this lock in.If it&#x27;s the latter, you may have missed the point. GP was clear they want modern safety and powertrain, just without the tracking.None of the safety features you mention require the manufacturer to harvest and sell personal data — that&#x27;s a separate choice OEMs have made, not a technical prerequisite.

Modern cars evolved in terms of safety, this includes active safety too. All the safety features require OEM hardware&#x2F;software that locks you in, for example replacing windshield in many models requires dealership calibration.And with all the distracted drivers looking into their phones while driving, I want more and more cars to get at least emergency breaking systems.

I own a base model 2020 Suzuki Swift GL, which I specifically bought because it has no touchscreen. It has a radio with Bluetooth and dials - that is it.No issues so far.

FWIW: Hyundai EVs have physical buttons for everything important. It has a screen for CarPlay but it’s small compared to competitors. (I got the Kona for these reasons)

Honestly, all the modern tech, except the tracking and touchscreens, is pretty freakin&#x27; awesome.

As much as I and (probably) most other consumers agree with you, I don&#x27;t think the car insurance industry does. Very similarly to how governments being buyers of data from adtech companies makes it an impossibility for governments to enact good privacy laws, there are massive perverse incentives here that place too much money on the table for good things to ever happen; car manufacturers want to gatekeep the sale of our data to insurance companies and governments, insurance companies want to lobby for laws that mandate data collection so that more claims can be denied and profit can rise, and governments are happy to enforce data collection because it strengthens their surveilance mechanisms.

I&#x27;ve been dreaming of doing an EV conversion on my 2008 Honda Civic that I barely even drive. No cellular radio, no OTA updates, no touchscreen. I lack the mechanical skills and time though, and I&#x27;m not aware of people in my area that do conversions as a service for anything but like high end classic cars(which a Honda sedan is not).

That&#x27;s the pitch behind the Slate truck right? Just the basics to make it a functional vehicle and then you add only what you want.

Citation needed. What law requires tracking software, touch screens, and vendor-lock-in for automobiles? I disbelieve there is anything preventing the commercial sale so long as it has the minimum safety standards and roadworthiness. Costs money to get everything certified, but it doesn&#x27;t have to also be enshittified.

It can be built but it wouldn&#x27;t be legal to sell commercially. Closest thing would be a kit car (which I&#x27;ve always felt haven&#x27;t scaled as much as they theoretically could)

It&#x27;s just so ugly. Why did they make it so ugly? :(

The Leaf is one of those cars now too: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.caranddriver.com&#x2F;photos&#x2F;g65082021&#x2F;2026-nissan-leaf-revealed-interior-gallery&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.caranddriver.com&#x2F;photos&#x2F;g65082021&#x2F;2026-nissan-le...</a>

I would have considered a Leaf but they have NMC batteries. Also, the earlier versions had terrible battery cooling issues. Give me a Leaf with an LFP and I would buy one.

People who says this never even consider Nissan Leaf. &quot;Because the charging...&quot; or whatever.So consumers DO want all-touchscreen disposable cars like Tesla - it&#x27;s similar to how disposable phones had replaced phones with removable batteries(even among IP rated phones). Wallets vote strongly against consumers.

The problem is that the difference between a low tech and a high tech diesel tractor is mostly emissions and some loss of efficiency. The difference between a low tech and a high tech electric car is a 25 mile range and a 250 mile range, a top speed of 35 mph and 100 mph, carrying capacity and so on.I recently did a lawn tractor conversion from gas to electric and what I got was in my opinion significantly better and more reliable than a commercial option at 20% of the price but it is limited to 4mph. Scaling it to 5 would require a lot of custom fabrication and a much more expensive drive motor. Once this tech is significantly better and cheaper to the point of being a commodity it will be a different story. For now it just isn’t.

There is a golden era of cars, say 5 to 10 years ago that have things like heated seats but no tracking.Personally I have a 2019 Mazda 3 which has camera vision all around, radar cruise control and heated seats but no lane assist bumping you around or a cellular connection relaying any information.The only anti feature it has is that stupid idle stop, but that’s easy to permanently disable. It also has car play but doesn’t have a touch screen.Anyway I’m not saying you should get this car specially but there are cars out there that are like what you want.

Most 10+ years old cars don&#x27;t have tracking, and many of those engines just keep working fine with basic maintenance. Our BMW F11 from 2014 is one of such cars, no interference or connections, 250 HP is enough for family car, big trunk, 4WD.Extremely comfortable and especially on long hauls, extremely nice experience to drive (people like to bash bmw owners but its really a premium experience to drive and not just look at, at least this one and previous E46 one certainly are). Of course heated seated, power windows and best implementation of laser hud projection on windshield I ever saw.Most modern basic&#x2F;middle class cars feel like half-assed shit compared to it. Cost peanuts these times too.

context: previously worked for an automobile oemthe current trend in the industry (before ai everything) has been software defined vehicle [1].while the ux has been horible, the things hidden away from us are also becoming very bloated, and beyond the microcontroller-level complexity.as a side-effect, even if you build a modern, mass-market car without screens, the ones in the future would still need to be connected to the manufacturer for ota updates for core functionality. expect supply-chain issues like people faced with axios, etc.[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Software_Defined_Vehicle" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Software_Defined_Vehicle</a>

Same. We are even seeing electronics come to bicycles now too, with electronic shifting (with questionable security, at that). I still ride a bike with mechanical shifting and external cable routing for a reason. It&#x27;s dead simple, and I can do my own wrenching at home, and most repairs &amp; adjustments are a matter of minutes instead of hours.I don&#x27;t want a laptop &amp; to do a brake bleed for every minor tweak or fix, nor do I want to have to charge my bike.This is also why I still drive a much older car and will hang on to it as long as I possibly can.I think repairability&#x2F;right to repair sometimes misses the simplicity aspect. Being able to repair something is great, however its less great if its extraordinarily complicated or you need to hire outside expertise. Keeping the machine as simple as possible so repairs can be done at home, with standard tools, is the real win. Its the difference between replacing a phone battery by sliding off a removable back cover, or needing a special toolkit and a heat gun to remove the screen and melt the adhesive first.

&gt; Or an internal combustion engine car that is just simple and efficientThis is basically a contradiction. The last 15 years of efficiency improvements were achieved by adding complexity: turbochargers, automatic start&#x2F;stop, direct injection, ECU controlled fuel ratios, etc.

Strongly recommend a ~2018 ICE Toyota (chosen for the goal of long-term ownership and maintenance, which includes widespread part availability and my own ability to make reasonable repairs to it at some point).

I want this for cars but to keep the modern powertrain. So an EV without the tracking&#x2F;touch screens, etc etc. Or an internal combustion engine car that is just simple and efficient (and again, no tracking). I&#x27;ll take the low-tech but nice features like heated seats and power windows still thank you.

&quot;old&quot; tractors from 10+ years ago and new tractors are really ... not different at all. mechanically and structurally they are all the same. you can get a 20 year old deere&#x2F;kubota tractor that might even be better than a new one because of the decline in manufacturing, cost cutting across materials etc. if well maintained they last forever, and the older gear is easier to work on.

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.

this is what happens to every publicly traded company

Its the result of MBAs and private equity.  Capitalist market economies have existed since the dawn of civilization.  Money literally predates writing and the first writings were often invoices.  There is no inevitable result of capitalism as almost all of human history happened under some sort of capitalist system.

That to me just seems like the inevitable result of capitalist market economy.

What is it with American companies that eventually always try to sell crap and low moral products&#x2F;services. As if the people are educated in luring people into traps to only benefit themselves.

DPF (Diesel Particulate Filter) and SCR (Selective Catalytic Reduction, which uses DEF, Diesel Exhaust Fluid) are two mostly different systems. DPF traps soot in a filter which then burns the soot off into gas later (regen). SCR reduces NOx using urea.This is important to know in the context of tractors because in the US, 25-74hp tractors generally need only DPF without SCR (there are basically three bins depending on horsepower level). This makes these midsized tractors a bit of a sweet spot for a lot of tasks; of course, you still have to deal with regen (which is where the DPF gets heated up to convert trapped soot into gas), which is annoying, but you at least don&#x27;t have to fill up with DEF or risk the DEF injection system failing.

Anyone who actually has to use their equipment to get shit done dislikes DPF&#x2F;regen. It&#x27;s like Windows Update --- you might be in the middle of a serious task but screech &quot;time for a scheduled update! we dgaf what kind of critical task you were just doing, you want updates!&quot;Modern diesel systems equipped with DPF tech (which consumes DEF, the fluid) require a regen cycle which is kinda like an oven cleaning itself - they get super hot and burn away particulate before they can be used again. Farmers are more frustrated by the system than the fluid. In fact, DEF is really just piss (urea) which is the same kind of product that they use for fertilizer. Although the prices for urea have skyrocketed recently so perhaps they truly do hate DEF too.The awesome thing about these &#x27;older&#x27; Cummins engines is yes they lack DEF systems and also have mechanical fuel injection. As is commonplace with diesel, there are no spark&#x2F;glow plugs either. So ostensibly once you have the engine started, it requires zero electricity or computer systems to operate. The RPM of the engine dictates everything else mechanically through gearing. This is a big win for equipment that needs to &quot;just work&quot;. Of course they still have sensors and all kinds of systems that are kinda layered on top... but they&#x27;re not strictly required. This is also why the &quot;runaway diesel&quot; problem exists. You cannot stop an engine like this without starving it of air or fuel.

That’s exactly what I was thinking. And it makes me wonder if the future is manufactures repurposing older engines in new shells to bypass the increasingly more regulatory environments they operate in. Kind of a funny thing to think about.

The decision to lock down the ecu is quite another thing.It could easily have been done with a basic ecu that was readable by a $20 cable to your laptop.That being said, the DPF is the destroyer of modern engine reliability.

That&#x27;s most of it. It gets lost in the right to repair conversation, I think because many of the same individuals who care about that also tend to be very pro-environmental-regulation, but one has to take a step back and acknowledge the fact that the EPA made it illegal to build this tractor new instead of with a rebuilt truck engine from the 90s. You literally cannot build a legal diesel tractor in the US that doesn&#x27;t involve an ECU, sensors, DEF, and all the proprietary electronics to go along with those systems.If it was legal to build these at industrial scale, we&#x27;d already have it in the US because there&#x27;s blatant market demand for it. This is functionally no different from the shops putting 30 year old diesel engines in modern pickup trucks for the same reasons.The emissions are so unreliable that the only legal market for vehicles without them in the US is... the federal government.

Is part of the appeal due to the fact that being remanufactured engines they don&#x27;t need modern emissions control, aka Diesel Exhaust Fluid (DEF)?   Farmers hate DEF.

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.

No. Monitors are small, and suited for one person working close up. I am looking for a television without the &quot;computer&quot; inside of it.Yes, of course, it needs to have a computer to decode and display images, but I don&#x27;t want it to be running a stripped back version of Android, that shipped out of date and hasn&#x27;t received any updates, with apps that are laggy and often not current relative to other &quot;smart&quot; providers, that also takes pictures of my screen once every thirty seconds to tell the manufacturer what I&#x27;m watching and for how long, to build a better marketing profile on me.I want a big OLED panel with enough smarts to drive the screen. I will plug my own computer into the television, if the need should arise.

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 bought a LG one back in 2018 and so far it&#x27;s working fine. I hope it can last more than 10 years.

Using my friends Speed Queen washer&#x2F;dryer was such a revelation. I hate my Samsung washer&#x2F;dryer.

Yeah but I don’t see many dumb appliances nowadays TBH.

&gt; Some Chinese companies should take this niche or maybe not-niche field, sell at a premiumA friends dad sold his existing business and has been making $$$ in semi-rural texas importing and selling Chinese skid loaders. This market already exists.

That&#x27;s what I always want -- all of my appliances should look like the ones we got in the 90s&#x2F;2000s. Some Chinese companies should take this niche or maybe not-niche field, sell at a premium, which hopefully is still cheaper than smart ones.

I feel this. I&#x27;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&#x27;s job postings and they&#x27;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&#x27;s nothing you can do about it.

Good. Simplicity should win out over enshittification in the end.

Now let&#x27;s do washing machines and refrigerators

&gt; if there is some real competitionThey can&#x27;t scale this model up because they legally have to use rebuilt engines from the 90s to do it to get around modern diesel emissions regulations. It&#x27;s illegal to build this kind of engine in the US new, there&#x27;s no way to compete with Deere&#x27;s scale.

This is great, if there is some real competition, then we can see John Deere will have to figure out how to compete. Either with lower prices or less lock in.

No-tech tractor seems to be  a bit of an oxymoron.

I do, but a friend is taking care of the farm now. I moved back to the big city lights (Munich, as fate would have it).

While I love wrenching on cars, I imagine a tractor like this would scratch a different itch—something more latent, leftover from childhood.Do you still have the Massy?

My grandpa was a high school principal to support his love of farming, not because he wasn&#x27;t dedicated, but because they wanted to survive

Did your dad grow up with subsistence farmers?
I also encountered plenty of hobby farmers who joke about the cost of their hobby which used to get me confused a bit since it was very much a food on the table thing for my grandparents and at least a small financial bonus to me.Then again I don&#x27;t buy much new other than seed. Everything feels like a ripoff nowadays.

My dad had one of these, to support his farming hobby. (He used to joke that we ate fifty dollar cucumbers, and a hundred-dollar ear of corn.)It came in handy living in the country, when occasionally someone would get bogged down on a dirt road, and this thing would come to the rescue.

Any sufficiently mundane technology is indistinguishable from... furniture?

An internal combustion engine may be complex, but it&#x27;s not fancy. I can see and touch and understand every part of it. I can maintain and modify and repair it. This is not true for fancy electronics and certainly not locked-down proprietary firmware.

Any technology from before the time of your grandparents, and often parents, is usually perceived to be &quot;not fancy&quot;. Because then those elders can&#x27;t tell you in your childhood what life was like before that technology. So in your lived experience that technology was always there. Reading history later on, doesn&#x27;t change your emotional experiences.

Maybe it is fancy to you now, but with a few primitive hand tools and no docs at all, a HS graduate can take it apart and figure out how it works.Try doing the same on the ECU in your car. I&#x27;ll wait.

Yeah, I was introspecting as I wrote that!

We also don&#x27;t call a hoe fancy technology, but it is.

&gt; no fancy technology in it at allIt&#x27;s amazing we can use huge machinery with internal combustion engines and declare it &quot;no fancy technology&quot;

Class of Middle Eastern tabletop usually-tobacco smoking devices with water based filtering1: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Hookah" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Hookah</a>

&gt; The air filter was basically a shisha-pipe that bubbled the incoming air through wire wool and engine oil.What is a shisha-pipe?

Up until a year ago I was regularly using a Massy Fergusson 135 [0] (Perkins Diesel version), made sometime in the 1970s. It was wonderful! So amazing to drive and use. Clunky and heavy, but you really really felt like you were using a machine. In low gears, if you put you foot down on the accelerator the engine would roar, and your speed would barely change!And there was no fancy technology in it at all. If I was in the forest and had forgotten the key, I&#x27;d just reach behind the dashboard and hot-wire it. The air filter was basically a shisha-pipe that bubbled the incoming air through wire wool and engine oil.Its fuel gauge didn&#x27;t work either. You just had to take a look in the tank, or quickly react as soon as the revs started dropping. I ran it dry a few times and had to sit there with a spanner in one hand and YouTube into the other, while trying to bleed all the fuel lines. But they were all on the outside of the vehicle, which made it comparatively easy I imagine.I&#x27;ve never actually driven a modern tractor, so don&#x27;t know how it compares. I imagine the clutch is easier on the knees these days!Anyway, this just felt like the place to share this.[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Massey_Ferguson_135" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Massey_Ferguson_135</a>

Alberta startup sells no-tech tractors for half price