John Deere boasts driverless fleet at CES - who needs operators anyway?

CES John Deere's vision of the future of farming, quarrying, and landscaping has emerged at CES 2025, and it's one that includes far fewer jobs for equipment operators and plenty more machine-driven independence.

After unveiling its first autonomous tractor at CES in 2022, John Deere returned to Las Vegas to introduce four new autonomous vehicles and a second-generation autonomy kit capable of doing far more than tilling rows.

The new hardware, said CEO of Deere autonomy subsidiary Blue River Technology Willy Pell, will upgrade driverless Deere vehicles from plowing straight lines in open farm fields to navigating tight orchard lanes, quarrying, and mowing grass. Those new capabilities are thanks to enhanced camera arrays that extend the vision range from 16 meters to 24 meters, and Nvidia Orin GPUs that enable "full classification in milliseconds," Pell said.

The enhanced camera range means tractors can increase their speed by up to 40 percent - autonomously - and it also enable them to use wider implements.

"This new kit ... will be able to do every job a tractor does on a farm," Pell said during a press conference at CES media day yesterday. "This will alleviate farmers from acute labor availability constraints throughout the entire year."

And there's the key behind these announcements: Deere is hoping to capitalize on what it said are widespread labor shortages in agriculture, construction, and commercial landscaping to push more autonomous hardware.

According to Deere, there are about 2.4 million farming jobs that have to be filled annually by a shrinking labor force, while 88 percent of construction contractors struggle to find skilled labor, and 86 percent of landscaping firms have a hard time filling open positions, too.

"There simply isn't enough available and skilled labor to do that work in a timely and efficient manner," John Deere chief technology officer Jahmy Hindman said during the press briefing. "Autonomy can be part of that solution."

Not quickly, though: Deere told us that its new autonomy tech "will be with a limited number of test cooperators this year," and didn't directly state when any of the tech would be commercially available.

New autonomous vehicles showcased, with no mention of repairability

With Deere's second-generation autonomy objective of going beyond the farm field, it introduced four new variants of existing vehicles that will ship with new autonomy hardware: A 9RX tractor for large-scale agriculture, a 5ML tractor for air-blast sprayers in orchards, an autonomous 460 P-Tier articulated dump truck for quarry operations and a new battery electric commercial landscaping mower.

Because it operates in tight quarters, the 5ML will also include LiDAR sensors, and a fully-electric version of the tractor is also in development, though that's not getting the autonomy features yet. All of the second-gen autonomy hardware shipping with new vehicles will also be installable on older Deere devices, too, the agricultural giant said, through the eventual availability of "retrofit kits."

"Deere's autonomy retrofit capabilities showcase the evolution and adaptability of Deere's technology, ensuring that both new and existing equipment can benefit from the latest advancements," the company told us. No word on when those kits would be available.

But despite five Deere and Blue River leaders taking to the CES stage to discuss all those new autonomy features, there wasn't a single mention of repairability made during its presentation.

The lack of any mention of Deere's ongoing right-to-repair fight, which has pitted it against angry tractor owners and the US government, is especially glaring given it was dubbed the worst in the show in 2022 through a community choice poll run by right to repair advocacy group Repair.org.

Deere's first-generation autonomous 8R tractor faced criticism from repairability experts in 2022 for limiting collaboration with the security community by restricting efforts to examine its software for vulnerabilities-an issue when relying on closed-source code to safely navigate farms and other work sites.

The farm equipment behemoth was accused late last year by US Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) of failing to live up to a right to repair memorandum of understanding between it and the American Farm Bureau Federation, leading to the FTC beginning a probe into Deere for deceptive trade practices.

When asked about the repairability features of the new autonomous tractors, Deere didn't have much to say.

"Deere supports customers' rights to safely maintain, diagnose, service, and repair their own equipment," the company told us. Given its track record on that support so far, your mileage, be it in a quarry, an office park lawn or a farm field, may vary. ®