TV star, journalist and farmer Jeremy Clarkson has revealed he’s bought a driverless tractor.
The former Grand Tour and Top Gear host has always suggested he’s sceptical about the point of driverless cars, but says a driverless tractor is different, because it can “just get on with it, like your autonomous vacuum cleaner does in your sitting room or your self-driving mower does on the lawn.”
Writing in the Times, Jeremy Clarkson says he’s leased a tractor made in the Netherlands using German engineering, called the AgBot T2, calling it “the coolest machine in the world”.
He writes: “It normally takes 20 hours with a 3m cultivator to prepare the 200 acres we use every year for growing pasta and lager. And then it takes about ten hours to plant the actual seeds. That’s 30 hours of me just sitting there, in a bouncy tractor, going up and down endlessly. And even though I’ve now had five years of practice, I’m still not very good at it. I miss bits. I cock up turns and corners. I hit gateposts and most years I bounce along for hours not realising that the hopper is empty and I’m busy planting nothing at all. Then I’ve got to work out where it ran out, which is not easy because it’s usually dark and cold and I just want to go home and weep.
“An autonomous tractor would not make mistakes like this and it would not get bored. It doesn’t need to stop for a wee and it does not need to sleep. It just goes up and down and then up and down again. For ever.”
The new initiative is sure to feature in the next series of Clarkson’s Farm on Prime, where co-star Kaleb Cooper is apparently less sure: “Kaleb hates it,” Clarkson continues. “He says it’ll put him out of a job. I did point out, though, that if his contracting business had one he could turn up at someone’s farm, set it off and then go to someone else’s farm with his normal tractor and get paid twice. Double dipping. He did agree I had a point.”
You can read the full article here (paywall).
(Picture – Amazon Prime)
