Addendum to my post above…
The way they’re marketing this makes me wonder a bit how in touch they are with their target market. Or possibly I’m missing who their target market actually is as I’m assuming it’s large ag.
Their web page is focused on the labor saving for the farmer. The kind of pitch I’d expect to see for a mostly consumer product such as an air fryer or autonomous lawnmower.
I work in an ag support industry that deals with large farmers, albeit specific to NC. The mid to large (not the side gig supplementing a W-2 job) farmers I work with are serious business people in a tough business with a lot of risk and tight margins. They’re much more concerned about the bottom line on their balance sheet than how much sleep they get during planting season. They’re trying to convince those business people it’s better to transition from three 400 HP tractors running GPS auto-steer with 24 row planters to fifteen 90 HP tractors running full autonomous with 5 row planters. I don’t see them convincing many of their potential customers with the prospect of sleeping through planting. If they were talking more about expense saving, ROI, reduced exposure to lost production due to breakdowns, reduced staffing needs; more of a business case, then I could see some adoption of their product. Sure, there may be some who will give this a test run on one tractor and develop the data for the business case themselves.
Their model doesn’t seem to fit harvest as well as it fits planting. At harvest, the farmer can’t run large carts like they do now because they don’t have the large tractors to pull them. So now they have a larger fleet of smaller tractors pulling a commensurate fleet of smaller carts, which are harder to hit with the unload auger of a moving harvester and require multiple operators as full autonomy pulling a cart from a truck loading staging area or storage site (which often involves public road use) to a field and back is unlikely. The auto steer capability to link to the harvester while loading on the fly is already on the market, but it’s that trip to and from the field that requires a driver in the seat.
Last, and this one is specific to my wheelhouse, one of the issues with full autonomous vehicles (on road or off) is that for our legal system, at least in the US, there is no case law (that I’m aware of anyway, and certainly none in NC) that addresses who is responsible for damages and injuries caused by malfunction of a fully autonomous vehicle. Is it a product defect action against the manufacturer? A negligent maintenance / negligent operation action against the owner/operator? The real answer is likely both pointing fingers at each other and fact specific to each case, which isn’t a good situation for those who have been harmed as the “facts” are a jury question and unlikely to be agreed upon by all in many cases. So far, that’s been an interesting academic debate and nothing more as the “autonomous” vehicles currently in production, outside of highly controlled environments such as factories, have, to my knowledge, retained the caveat that an operator must be present and alert as the operator has the final responsibility for the actions of the vehicle and the autonomous functions are “driver aids” not full autonomy, which allows the manufacturer to wash their hands of the liability issue in all but the most egregious of defect cases, same as is the case with vehicles without driver aids. In this scenario the manufacturer is suggesting the owner/operator set the machines in motion and retire to bed while the multiple machines work. That’s FAR different legally from anything currently in the market.