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Alberta startup sells no-tech tractors for half price

wheelfront.com

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Re: Alberta startup sells no-tech tractors for half price

#331

Post by organsnyder »

WarmWash wrote: post #213
MrMetric wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An internal combustion engine may be complex, but it'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.

The magic of an engine is less in how it operates, and more in how it was built. At least around the time they started showing up, manufacturing lots of precision metal parts was not trivial. Although modern electronics take this further, with both operation and construction being utterly complex.

One of my vehicles is a 2009 Civic. It continues to amaze me that with minimal maintenance, that 17-year-old vehicle will fire right up with the turn of a key, with hundreds (thousands?) of parts moving in a specific way, many of them with tolerances in tiny fractions of an inch.

Re: Alberta startup sells no-tech tractors for half price

#332

Post by kube-system »

jfengel wrote: post #307
kube-system wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cheap ones too -- aliexpress has them. But there's more to agtech than driving a tractor around, a lot of what these big integrated systems do (at the high end) is very data driven -- determining where and how to plant, irrigate, fertilize, etc. There's a lot of integration work beyond just making the tractor drive.

What kind of sensors do those cheap kits come with? A tractor is a big thing to have rolling around unsupervised. I would want a lot of safeguards. Blindly going from one GPS point to another sounds like a nightmare.

The cheapie aliexpress specials simply drive the line they're programmed to drive. They have GPS and a gyro to account for the slope of the land. You're supposed to stay in the tractor while they're operating as a safety... but this doesn't always happen in some parts of the world.

Re: Alberta startup sells no-tech tractors for half price

#333

Post by itopaloglu83 »

dev_hugepages wrote: post #19
itopaloglu83 wrote: post #5

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

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.

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

Re: Alberta startup sells no-tech tractors for half price

#334

Post by edm0nd »

arein3 wrote: post #300
cout wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lawnmowers are usually four-stroke, with two-stroke engines reserved for lighter tools like string trimmers and chainsaws. I would still guess that lawnmowers produce more emissions overall, given that there are so many more mowers than tractors. But they get used less often than tractors, so who knows? Either way, I agree with your thinking process, that the most economical way to reduce overall emissions is to focu…

For tools electric is the answer. To take a chainsaw, the battery needs to be replaced just as often as with refilling the fuel tank. And with newer batteries you might recharge the depleted one as fast as discharging a fresh one. Not sure, just an assumption. The future for tools is electric 100%.

my brother in Christ, electric chainsaws are garbage, have you ever used one? I tried one out to clear a huge 3 foot wide tree that fell on my property and yeah those things cannot hang with gas powered chainsaws in any way, shape, or form. No one is using electric chainsaws for cutting anything significant.

they may have a place in the distant future but in 2026, aint no way.

Re: Alberta startup sells no-tech tractors for half price

#335

Post by d--b »

I think there is a market for cars as well.

15 years ago, Dacia used to make stripped sedans that sold for as cheap as 7.5k euros. It was a wild success. Now, they've pivoted to making modern cars, still on the cheap side, but the cheapest now is a compact car that sells for 13k.

The only reason is that those modern cars have higher margins and there is no competition for cheap cars. So why make cheap cars to kill the market of higher margins ones?

The free market, if it works at all, should produce companies like wheelfront that caters to that share of the population.

Re: Alberta startup sells no-tech tractors for half price

#336

Post by sparrc »

throwaway85825 wrote: post #290
jadbox wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd love this. I really don't want my car to be an iPhone with "apps" 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's insane when I see car UIs that have the 'cancel / go back' button located in DIFFERENT areas depending on the screen context.

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.

A screen for the backup camera doesn't necessarily mean everything has to be through the screen at all.

Most Toyotas I've seen have a screen for the backup camera and the carplay/music/gps console, but everything else is still knobs and buttons.

This is true on both my 2013 and 2026 Toyotas.

Re: Alberta startup sells no-tech tractors for half price

#337

Post by lachlan_gray »

userbinator wrote: post #243
adamcharnock wrote: post #134

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 i…

with a spanner in one hand and YouTube into the other There are so many useful videos on this stuff, but unfortunately the majority of the population still seems reluctant to learn.

Tangential, but made me think of this YouTube channel I like.

I have no plans to own a tractor but for some reason many others and I enjoy videos like this one:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=pQO-pVxvKvA

Re: Alberta startup sells no-tech tractors for half price

#338

Post by Waterluvian »

This feels like a great opportunity for Canada. We have tremendous need for tractors. The skillset for automotive/machinery and farming. A need for domestic industry development. Offers another non-American option. These don’t suffer as much from tech supply chain pains by not being full of electronics.

Re: Alberta startup sells no-tech tractors for half price

#339

Post by coder97 »

I think the trend we are seeing with tractors and cars is a circular one that the industry isn't ready for: we moved from pure mechanical machines to "mechanical + some electronics," and we are currently in the "some mechanical + more electronics" phase. But the next logical step for longevity is a return to "mostly mechanical" interfaces powered by open standards.

The problem isn't the presence of electronics. It's the use of electronics as a proprietary layer to gatekeep physical hardware. When a tractor becomes a "software platform," the farmer loses the ability to perform basic maintenance because of DRM and encrypted ECU handshakes.

We need to treat the electronics as a component of the tool, not the owner of the tool. If the software is the only thing preventing a mechanical machine from functioning, that's not a feature but a defect

Re: Alberta startup sells no-tech tractors for half price

#340

Post by oxag3n »

monooso wrote: post #289
oxag3n wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Modern cars evolved in terms of safety, this includes active safety too. All the safety features require OEM hardware/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.

> All the safety features require OEM hardware/software that locks you in... I'm unclear whether you're stating the current state of affairs, or arguing that such safety features cannot exist without this lock in. If it'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…

I was stating current state of affairs. I don't think the point is only about avoiding tracking and personal data harvesting. My 10 years old Honda has emergency breaking and lane assist and it's not connected to the internet, nor I'm servicing it at the dealership to be concerned about data harvesting. I still couldn't enable the system after replacing broken windshield - I had to get it to the dealership so they could re-enable the safety system.
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