Practical and customer-oriented electrification of agricultural tractors

Given the current energy situation and a strong push for electrifying the off-road machinery industry, John Deere intends to lead the electric journey in the agriculture machinery industry by contributing to the environmental goals to limit impacts of climate change. Electrifying agricultural machineries, however, come with its set of challenges related to the energy consumption by different customers. Agricultural tractors, specifically, are designed aimed at a wide range of customer and application profiles. Despite previous attempts to electrify tractors, the scope of such electrified tractors is mostly limited to a few niche applications with lower power demands. Understanding the customer and application needs is a key to designing electrified tractors of tomorrow. The path to electrification may not be as simple as replacing the available fuel-energy by electric energy. Based on customer and application requirements for different power-class of tractors, different innovative solutions are required to overcome the challenges a customer might face with such an electrified tractor. In the paper, these challenges are looked at by comparing different customer and application profiles.