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The story
A report that Ursa, a Canadian tractor manufacturer selling tractors marketed as “repairable by farmers themselves,” is seeing strong sales became a hot topic in the German-language Lemmy community c/dach. Discussion kicked off with people questioning the oddly high number of gears listed in the catalog — “32 forward, 32 reverse” — which led to a technical deep-dive into tractor transmission mechanisms. From there, the conversation expanded into frustration over the lack of electric vehicles on the market that are both repairable and durable, as well as concerns about ceding control of one’s vehicle to software made by untrustworthy manufacturers.
Tractors that farmers can repair themselves are selling well
Source: heise.de / Original article here
What people said
Neither, actually. The tractor's brochure literally says:
> Transmission Manual / 32 forward / 32 reverse
In farming, you often operate at pretty low speed ranges depending on the task, equipment, and conditions, so having a lot of gears actually makes sense. When accelerating, you just skip over most of them.
Is that just endless gear-grinding, or is this some kind of translation (Übersetzung) mix-up?
Just a guess, but I think it's multiple gearboxes connected in series — like an 8-speed and a 4-speed combined with a dedicated forward/reverse unit.
https://www.ursa-ag.ca/products/260/index.html
The official site says the same thing. I'm not a farmer, but I'd guess each gear range serves a different purpose — like field work (5-10 km/h) versus road driving (25-60 km/h).
Exactly — a "smart" EV that's actually repairable and built to last just doesn't exist on today's market.
I'm a farmer. Tractors have something called a "group shift" — on top of the regular gears, there's an additional shift stage above them. My somewhat older classic tractor has 4 gears x 4 groups, for a total of 4×4=16 speeds. That applies to both forward and reverse. And if it also has a switch for low/high range, that alone doubles it to 32…
Though it makes it a lot harder to fix with just a wrench.
I watched a video of a Unimog's shift levers recently — it had 8 speeds (starting in 4th or 5th on the road), a forward/reverse lever, plus two extra levers for two kinds of ultra-low "creep" gears. That one apparently has 24 speeds too.
So thinking about it that way, 32 isn't such a crazy number.
If software made by a 100% untrustworthy party is running somewhere, there's always a risk it'll someday act against your will or be used against your interests. Remember all those "downgrade updates" that make things more annoying with every patch. So I get the logic of "the less software running, the less trust you need to extend."
Cars that are both repairable and durable haven't existed on the market since long before EVs became practical, honestly.
Background and Key Points of This Discussion
The “repairability” theme that came up here has been drawing particular attention in the agricultural machinery world in recent years. Major tractor manufacturers restricting repairs through software — leaving farmers unable to fix their own machines — has become a political issue in North America and Europe under the banner of the “Right to Repair” movement. The “32 forward, 32 reverse” gear count questioned in the thread might sound like a joke, but it’s actually a realistic figure based on a mechanism specific to tractors called “group shifting,” which participants knowledgeable about farm equipment carefully explained. Meanwhile, the calls to apply the same philosophy to electric vehicles stem from a shared sense that today’s market offers almost no repairable, long-lasting options.
*This article is excerpted and loosely translated into Japanese by our editorial team from a thread on the overseas forum Lemmy c/dach titled “Der Traktor, den Landwirte selbst reparieren können, wird zum Verkaufserfolg.” Responsibility for the translation lies with this site.
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