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John Deere has just unveiled a number of new products CES 2025including an electric robotic lawnmower designed for commercial grade landscaping.
Powered by a 21.4 kWh battery pack — about a quarter the size you’d find in a passenger EV — the company says the mower can run for up to 10 hours. It uses four pairs of stereo cameras, two on each side, for 360-degree vision.
The electric lawnmower is quieter than its gas-powered predecessors, allowing John Deere to get those jobs started early in the morning. But the company does not hide that it expects the mower to be able to replace human labor. In fact, in the materials distributed to the press before the show, the company a report of a landscape management software company, said retaining skilled labor on staff is “a major challenge.”
“Our agriculture, construction and commercial landscaping customers all have work to do
at certain times of the day and year, but there isn’t enough available and skilled labor to get the job done,” said Jahmy Hindman, John Deere’s chief technology officer. “Autonomy can help solve that
challenge.”
John Deere’s other CES 2025 announcements also center around autonomy and are literally bigger.
There is an autonomous 5ML orchard tractor that can spray plants. It will start as a diesel-only tractor, although John Deere will eventually follow up with a “battery electric tractor of comparable size and capacity.” The company also showcased its larger 9RX tractor for tillage, which uses a 16-chamber array.
The largest is an autonomous truck built for quarry operations. These types of sites have been using autonomy for a while, and the new 460 P-Tier dump truck John Deere showed at CES is the latest entry.
Each of these products will help you boost an important but often overlooked business that many people never think about. And they are likely to replace or augment the same labor. But this is a robotic mower that most of us will encounter at some point in the near future. We just don’t know when — a John Deere representative says “an exact time is not being shared at this time.”
