Slap a few cheap cameras, a GPS receiver, and Comma.ai and you're fully automated.
You'd need steering, throttle and braking actuators as well as radar to get comma.ai working with it.
Alberta startup sells no-tech tractors for half price
591–600 of 814 posts
Re: Alberta startup sells no-tech tractors for half price
#592Up 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…
The name of the brand is "Massey Ferguson" not "Massy Fergusson".
The reason I know that is not that I'm a farmer. It's that 20 years ago a bunch of friends and I wrote and performed a parody song of Gainsbourg/Bardot song "Harley Davidson" where the motorbike brand was replaced with the tractor one.
"Je n'ai besoin de personne en Harley Davidson"
became
"Je n'ai besoin de personne en Massey Ferguson".
Re: Alberta startup sells no-tech tractors for half price
#593Up 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…
Must be used all around the world.
My parents had one on our farm in the 70s.
Maybe it is still there- as a "back up" tractor.
I remember it well.
Re: Alberta startup sells no-tech tractors for half price
#594I want a half-price no-tech electric car.
Re: Alberta startup sells no-tech tractors for half price
#595Earlier quoted context omitted.
Oh, god yes. I mowed using a Farmall H on a family farm when I was about 12 y/o. I don't remember ever having deadly serious conversations with family members up to that point in my life. All four grandparents, aunts and uncles-- it seemed like everybody-- sat me down, looked me dead in the eye, and told me sternly and bluntly "you turn off the PTO and see the shaft isn't turning before you get off the tractor. Every…
Without going too far into the weeds here, IMO this experience is representative of gun rights, zoning, and all sorts of other differences between urban and rural. Rural kids are put into situations where they are expected to rely fully on themselves, with life-or-death consequences, from a young age. When your pre-teen is driving a machine on their own that could easily kill them or those around them, giving them a…
The phrasing of "gun rights" in the context that's really about gun responsibilities is a big part of the problem. And I say this from an unusual position; I'm a Brit who was taught to shoot at school (cadets). The urban gun control question is not so much about responsibility as about malice. There's not a huge number of people with murderous intent, but there are enough. And the resistance of rural America to the questions of either "do you actually need a gun?", "are you a responsible person?", and "no, you can't bring that into the city" result in thousands of deaths every year in the city. If they were willing to allow separate rules for different areas, this wouldn't be nearly as heated.
> a large number of people who live in cities seem to want to extend childhood through age 25
This is not great, and a more complicated problem of percieved danger.
Re: Alberta startup sells no-tech tractors for half price
#596Belarus makes tractors. I bet people could have had these kinds of tractors long ago if not for the sanctions.
dictatorship is anticompetitive practice(slaves work is cheap) and relying on its produce to produce essentials is national security issue.
Re: Alberta startup sells no-tech tractors for half price
#597This 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 increasin…
> overstrain them, and put huge turbos on the engines
This doesn'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 "turbofans" 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'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'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's an engine that'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, "car enthusiasts" were laughing hysterically at the idiots who'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.
Re: Alberta startup sells no-tech tractors for half price
#598That's how you deal with vendor lock in. These farmers have more balls than most Apple users.
Huh? Aren't the tractors using a loophole to avoid emissions regulations? You can do a lot of things if you don't care about the spirit of the law and your negative externalities.
Which loophole? Using a remanufacture engine?
Re: Alberta startup sells no-tech tractors for half price
#599[dead]
Re: Alberta startup sells no-tech tractors for half price
#600Earlier quoted context omitted.
Huh? Aren't the tractors using a loophole to avoid emissions regulations? You can do a lot of things if you don't care about the spirit of the law and your negative externalities.
Which loophole? Using a remanufacture engine?
Yes, they're engines that you wouldn't be allowed to build and put in a new tractor.
Like, the signals seem pretty clear to me. The spirit of the regulations is that these shouldn't be produced and put into operation anymore. The company is doing it anyway.