We were in Vegas. The tractor was in Austin—1
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MotorTranscript
00:00 [MUSIC PLAYING]
00:03 Hi from the John Deere booth at CES in Las Vegas,
00:12 where we're going to drive a tractor from Austin.
00:15 The tractor is in Austin, and we're here in Vegas.
00:17 We're going to drive it remotely with this iPhone, which
00:20 is really cool.
00:20 So we've got Doug here, who's with John Deere.
00:22 He's going to show us a little bit about how
00:24 this is going to work.
00:25 So our tractor is out there.
00:26 This is live footage, right?
00:28 So as a farm manager, I want to be
00:31 able to keep an eye on this autonomous equipment
00:33 and understand what's happening.
00:35 So I can see the field that it's working in.
00:37 I can look at some of the key performance
00:39 and see how many acres have been done in the last hour.
00:42 And now, let's say that I want to go ahead and stop it.
00:47 I want to--
00:48 Wait, wait.
00:48 Before you do that, before you do that,
00:51 to basically make sure that we're not just
00:54 like doing a hoax or whatever, we actually
00:56 did send Motor Trend editor Alexander Stoklosa out
00:59 to that field in Austin.
01:00 He's in that little gator that's out there
01:03 to verify that this is actually what we're doing.
01:05 So we are going to stop the tractor,
01:08 and we're going to see if Alex can say definitively if we
01:11 have stopped it in real life.
01:13 You can stop the tractor with this pause button, right?
01:15 That's right.
01:16 You can see that it says it's working right now.
01:18 I'm going to hit this pause button right here,
01:20 and within just a couple of seconds,
01:22 you're going to see the tractor come to a stop.
01:25 That's so cool.
01:27 Can I start it again?
01:28 You can.
01:28 So if you hit this resume button--
01:31 OK.
01:31 --go ahead and do that.
01:32 Start.
01:33 And what you'll see now, look up on the screen,
01:35 you'll see that it is in a warning sequence.
01:37 That's going to make some sounds and flash some lights
01:40 and make sure that no one, that anyone that is around
01:43 is aware for safety reasons.
01:44 And just in a couple of seconds, start back up and take off
01:48 again, and there you go.
01:49 That's so cool.
01:50 OK, what else can I do here?
01:51 You can adjust some speed.
01:53 So let's say that you--
01:54 let's say rain's coming.
01:55 All right.
01:55 And you want to get this job done even faster.
01:57 You can just dial up from five miles an hour.
02:00 Let's go up to six miles an hour.
02:02 Oh, man.
02:02 We're cooking now.
02:04 That's right.
02:05 And if you notice, this is a remote display
02:07 in the bottom right corner.
02:08 You can see you've got that machine working
02:10 at six miles an hour now.
02:13 Can I slow it all the way down to like--
02:14 You can slow it back down to four if you'd like.
02:16 What's the slowest speed?
02:18 Maybe a couple of miles an hour.
02:20 Now, if you'd like to see a live--
02:22 we'd like to see a live view of what
02:23 the tractor is actually seeing.
02:25 Yes, absolutely.
02:26 Show me everything.
02:27 So let's touch the live view.
02:28 Live view.
02:29 That's going to activate the camera feed.
02:35 So let's take a look here.
02:36 So imagine I'm a farmer.
02:37 I might be 10 miles or 1,300 miles away,
02:41 and I want to be able to see what--
02:43 this is the rear camera.
02:46 So let's say I wanted to get a sense of the job quality
02:49 that was going on.
02:49 I see Alex's shadow.
02:50 You can see the shadow of the gator.
02:52 I can touch on the speed.
02:54 Now I want to see out the front.
02:56 So this is out the front of the tractor.
02:58 If I wanted to just check on what the field conditions are
03:00 really looking like.
03:02 So really, this really is true that the farmer can be in more
03:05 than one place at a time.
03:07 I could be driving another piece of equipment
03:09 in a different field and still keeping
03:11 an eye on what's happening.
03:13 And you said this technology's been around for a couple
03:16 of years now, and you are rolling it out commercially.
03:18 That's right.
03:18 Yes, we have paying customers in seven states.
03:22 We're in the initial stages of that commercial rollout,
03:25 and it'll be expanding even further as we go forward.
03:28 Now would it be possible to have a person sitting in there
03:33 while it's also driving autonomously?
03:35 Is that allowed?
03:36 We do have a ride along mode.
03:37 So if the farmer wanted to gain some confidence in how
03:40 the system worked to be able to be in the scene,
03:42 that is possible to do.
03:44 Yeah, for sure.
03:45 Well, this is awesome.
03:46 Thank you so much for showing us--
03:47 You bet.
03:48 --this new piece of technology.
03:50 Awesome.
03:50 Thanks for coming.
03:51 Thanks, guys.
03:52 Story Up at Motor Trend.
03:53 Visit it.
03:54 Read it.
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