Right to repair doesn't change any of that. Farmers were adjusting that screw anyways, that was the entire point. I'm not mad at farmers for doing it, I'm mad at John Deere at cheating the system.
Right to repair doesn't change any of that. Farmers were adjusting that screw anyways, that was the entire point. I'm not mad at farmers for doing it, I'm mad at John Deere at cheating the system.
The point is that when the firmware was locked down, it was vastly more difficult to bypass emissions restrictions. I'm not sure what you mean when you say John Deere was cheating the system. Arguably they were taking compliance more strictly before this ruling.
> I'm not sure what you mean when you say John Deere was cheating the system.
Instead of selling tractors with more powerful, but limited motors, they should have sold tractors with less powerful motors and no screw. There is no need to do any of this in software. They were purposefully avoiding the regulation by telling farmers, "do not loosen that screw, or you'll break the law, wink-wink!"
I'm no mechanical engineer, but can't any motor be run with greater power if the fuel mixture settings are remapped? Is it possible to design a motor that runs at 25 horsepower at leaner emissions-compliant settings, but can't run at higher power if a user changes the fueling settings to a richer mixture? I'm skeptical if it's even possible to design an engine that runs at 25 horsepower when complying with emissions requirements, but can't be tuned to run at higher power if users have the ability to change fuel settings.
> They were purposefully avoiding the regulation by telling farmers, "do not loosen that screw, or you'll break the law, wink-wink!"
They were? The whole point of John Deere locking down the firmware was to prevent this metaphorical loosening of the screw. It looks more like John Deere invested heavily in preventing modification of its hardware, much to the chagrin of farmers who wanted to cheat emissions.
It's more like: every engine has a metaphorical screw that can change the fuel mixture - this is inherent to combustion engines. John Deere made it really difficult or impossible to change that screw. Now farmers regained the ability to change that screw under the guise of repair.
The emissions restrictions were meant to get the likes of Deere to design and use smaller, more efficient engines, not to keep doing whatever they were with a slightly more restricted fuel hose.
“The purpose of a system is what it does.”
Yeah the outlook of a crook who only sees laws as quid pro quo vehicles for enriching those in the know.
I don't think VW and a few others trying to cheat the system to improve their bottom line makes it some kind of made up law that's supposed to be optics only and nothing in practice. It's just the typical corporate response to having to do something that's for the commons for once instead of tragedizing them.
I understand that imposing the restrictions may have involved great amounts of wishful thinking as to the outcome. Even this is not so certain because certain politicians were able claim a victory for having Done Something by writing words on pieces of paper. It may even be against their interest — and they are self-interested actors despite claims to being detached public servants — to solve an issue that is evidently so effective at getting people so worked up.
Vendors’ compliance is not disputed, and you have produced no credible evidence of cheating. If there were demand for the smaller, more efficient engines that you’re fantasizing about, someone would already be building them with no legislative restrictions necessary. Under capitalism, any valid complaint can be rephrased as a business plan. You may not like how they complied with the law, but that’s a you problem. If you can’t bear to see it that way, then take it up with the inept authors of the restrictions. The purpose of a system is what it does.
Stating a broader principle in order to apply it to this instance, we in the U.S. are not obligated to go out of our way to pay more in taxes: “The legal right of a taxpayer to decrease the amount of what otherwise would be his taxes, or altogether avoid them, by means which the law permits, cannot be doubted” (Gregory v. Helvering, https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/293/465/). Similarly, the law requires manufacturers to meet the restrictions and does not require them to go out of their way to incur the enormous costs of design, certification, building and tooling up new factories, testing, hiring, training, etc., etc., etc. to produce entirely new engines. Anyone who seriously proposed such a rigamarole would have been accused of over-engineering or Rube Goldberging. Executives who put such a plan in place would have been sued and likely lost their jobs.
Intertemporal effects matter, but they are so frequently left out of what passes for economic analysis.
Are you able to read minds to know what someone else’s outlook is? Your interpretation cannot be the most charitable one. https://ethics.org.au/ethics-explainer-the-principle-of-char...
posit: are these considered 'road vehicles' in the same way that a car is?
No, there are different standards, between road vehicles, mobile power trains, fixed, emergency, etc. Emergency and fixed tend to have the most liberal allowances. Public road vehicles the most stringent. Tractors are somewhere in-between.
Of course the government exempts itself from this because they know all that bullshit of "it's just as reliable etc" is trickery. It's common to buy previously government owned deleted vehicles, because the people working in federal government don't want to eat the dogfood the plebs do, and AFAIK if you buy it from them then you're allowed to have it.
It's not John Deere that was doing that, just some Korean companies exploring the opportunity and importing to the US. John Deere is located in the US and too afraid of the whimsical interpretations of regulators to try something like that, I think.
There was no "screw" for the commercial John Deere tractors with emissions controls, that I know of, as that was locked down to prevent "repair."
Lot of armchair quarterbacking going on, on both sides. I'd love to hear an actual farmer weigh in on this.
Anyone in the room care to volunteer?
tractorbynet is one of the better forums for info on opinions on tractors by people that use them regularly