Skip to main content

John Deere’s first fully electric tractor sounds like a jet engine

John Deere’s first fully electric tractor sounds like a jet engine

/

Now they’re green on the inside, too

Share this story

If you buy something from a Verge link, Vox Media may earn a commission. See our ethics statement.

American tractor manufacturer John Deere has pulled the wraps off of its first fully electric tractor in a new video published this week. The tractor project is called Sustainable Energy Supply for Agricultural Machinery, or SESAM, and John Deere plans to officially unveil it at the Paris International Agribusiness Show in early 2017.

Until then, we only know a few things about the SESAM tractor. As Jalopnik points out, it has an absolutely massive 150kWh battery pack — bigger than what you can find on any Tesla. It will supposedly have a range of about 55 kilometers (34 miles), and it takes about three hours to charge.

Is there an electric tractor war brewing?

But it’s also loud as hell. I mean, all tractors are loud as hell. But this one is loud in a totally different way. We only get a few seconds of natural audio in this video, but those clips are enough to make SESAM sound like it’s got a giant turbine strapped to it.

The sound is (maybe unsurprisingly) reminiscent of the noises created by the all-electric race cars of Formula E. And you know what’s funny about that? Mahindra, a massive manufacturing conglomerate from India, fields one of the more competitive teams in Formula E. Mahindra also happens to be the top tractor manufacturer in the world, and has been eating up John Deere’s market share in the US over the last decade.

Will we have an electric tractor war on our hands in the next few years? Probably, though Mahindra hasn’t publicly announced any plans regarding an electric tractor. But it’s a natural next step. The company flirted with the idea in a 2012 design contest, and currently makes electric bikes and scooters — the latter of which I got to ride this year at CES.