Same thing applies to this tractor design. JD uses it's customers to finalize R&D. A buyer of the latest/greatest product doesn't want to be that pig.
I'm all about it. But we aren't there yet. How about JD developing something such as this and offering it free to it's largest customers for R&D. Work out the details. Then offer it for sale. What a concept.
That seems to be most companies these days (using paying customers as beta testers). Being in high tech I can say there are a lot of reasons for that, some are good and some are bad.
It does sound like Deere let some farmers try out their autonomous tractor though. According to this article they started real-world testing on some guys farm 4 years ago so it sounds like some folks get to test stuff for free for the purposes of R&D.
I never claimed it would be trivial, I said I didn't know but I assume it would be trivial. Those are different statements with different meanings. Based on your response I also assumed you might have some actual experience with telematics, sensor design and machine learning but it sounds like that might be another bad assumption on my part. Regardless, if we can design rockets that can transport cargo to a station floating in outer space then land that rocket back on Earth vertically, I have to think we could (theoretically) design something that can detect when a tractor implement breaks. Before autonomous tractors there probably wasn't too much of a market for that but going forward there surely will be.Not my job. But you might want to look into the number of ground engaging elements on todays large planting and tillage equipment before claiming it would be trivial to install sensors to detect faults.