As Detroit carmakers and Silicon Valley tech giants vie to bring driverless cars to U.S. roads, one of the world's largest tractor makers is looking to do the same down on the farm.
Case IH, the agricultural-machinery unit of CNH Industrial, this week unveiled a sleek, aggressive-looking machine at the annual Farm Progress Show in Boone, Iowa.
This tractor — CNH calls it the Autonomous Concept Vehicle — comes equipped with cameras, radar and GPS, allowing a farmer to remotely monitor planting and harvesting via an app on a tablet computer, said Andreas Klauser, president and CEO of Case IH.
Agricultural-machinery companies like Case, Deere & Co. and Agco Corp. are keen to add the latest technology amid growing interest in the use of big data analysis, drones and satellite imaging.
While offering efficiencies, technological advances promise to reduce a farmer's traditional reliance on gut instinct. Some have expressed anxiety about corporations holding onto data gathered from their fields. London-based CNH would face headwinds in getting row-crop farmers to adopt its new technology, but it could gain a foothold in horticulture, Ann Duignan, an analyst at JPMorgan Chase in New York, wrote in an Aug. 30 report.
Dealing with the legal implications of self-driving tractors is one reason why it could take three years before they are commercially available, Klauser said. For example, a farmer, to get to another field, might need to cross a road.
He declined to disclose how much it has cost to build the tractor on display in Iowa, or how much such a machine might sell for. Case will analyze farmer feedback on its prototype. The 419-horsepower machine has a maximum speed of 31 miles per hour, according to Case. That's much bigger in scale and power than other autonomous concepts, said Sara Olson, a Boston-based analyst at Lux Research who studies farm technology.
"You're not doing it just to be a novelty," Klauser said. "You're doing it to increase the efficiency for your customers."
