To profi, the magazine for professional farm machinery

Dear Mr Neunaber, Editor-in-Chief! It was with utter dismay that I read the article “The diesel engine will stay”.

Where is your professionalism? “Combustion engines have not the slightest justification in the solar age – they are mobile boilers – even when they run on vegetable oil, biogas …” – surely an engineer like Dr Axel Kurz ought to know that? Look at the energy flow in a tractor: of 20 litres, only 4 litres arrive as tractive power! Who can still advocate such Stone Age technology?

Re: issue 7-2018, pages 62/63, “Der Dieselmotor wird bleiben” (The diesel engine will stay) profi editor Hubert Wilmer interviews Dr Axel Kurz – responsible for future drive systems at John Deere

It is more than a joke to run such an article by the fossil Johnnies stuck in the past in profi. It is as if the police were to ask a burglar which security measures should be taken to make burglaries impossible.

Battery technology is in use worldwide!!

The whole world, especially Asia and America, shows what is already possible today. By 2017, Shenzhen in China had replaced all of its 16,000 diesel buses with battery-powered electric buses. Elon Musk presented the Semi, a 40-tonne lorry that covers 800 km on one battery charge, recharges enough for 640 km in half an hour and is 20% cheaper than a diesel lorry. Pepsi Cola and logistics companies such as UPS ordered 125 Tesla Semi electric lorries.

PRESENTATION OF THE SEMI TRUCK (German) UPS ORDERS 125 ELECTRIC LORRIES (German)

The world’s largest electric dump truck with a 4.5-tonne battery

What a heavyweight: fully loaded, this dump truck weighs 123 tonnes. When it drives down into the valley, it generates so much electricity that it can drive back up to the quarry on its charged battery. All emission-free. This makes the dump truck from Switzerland the largest purely electric dump truck in the world.

ELECTRIC DUMP TRUCK (German)

As early as 2015, an Australian electric bus managed 1,000 kilometres without recharging.

ELECTRIC BUS TRAVELS 1,000 KM ON ONE CHARGE (German)

There are dozens of examples showing that today even the heaviest vehicles – construction machinery, wheel loaders, crawler excavators, high-speed trains with electric locomotives – run without any problems, largely on battery-powered electric drives. And that even though we are still in the Stone Age of battery storage technology. A whole range of developments suggest that battery storage with ten times the capacity of today’s best batteries will soon come onto the market – at a price that is only a fraction of today’s batteries, and chargeable in minutes. Why do you not present such prospects and realities in your specialist magazine?

That is why this article in your “professional magazine” is more than embarrassing: interviewing such dinosaurs from the Stone Age, who have not the slightest knowledge of either the present or the future.

At long last, show some courage: address the greatest challenges facing agriculture and humanity – dramatic climate change and the enormous scarcity of all resources – and present solutions. “Carrying on as before”, as your article shows, will inevitably plunge us into ruin. Machine manufacturers can neither imagine nor build electric drives – this has been clearly confirmed here, as it has time and again in the past. And yet John Deere in particular has fully developed the electric tractor and would only need to bring it to series production and look around for forward-looking storage technologies, which already exist, instead of still serving those stuck in the past.

See 11 December 2016: SESAM: John Deere shows its first electric tractor

The US agricultural machinery manufacturer has presented its first tractor with an electric drive. The 400 hp machine is to be shown in Paris in January. With SESAM (Sustainable Energy Supply for Agricultural Machinery), US agricultural machinery manufacturer John Deere has presented its first tractor with an electric drive. The machine, which is to make its debut at an agricultural fair in Paris in January, uses two electric motors of 150 kilowatts each. That gives a total output of around 400 hp.

JOHN DEERE – SESAM (German)

The Stone Age did not end for lack of stones, but because people knew something better!

Where is your journalistic duty of care? I worked in the lorry business for more than 43 years … The era of the combustion engine is definitely over. Why do you not publish anything in depth about these technologies? I shall cancel my subscription to this magazine, as it no longer reflects up-to-date developments.