Fendt Gets Electric With e107 V Vario

HANOVER, Germany (DTN) -- Fendt amped up its offerings by unveiling a small electric tractor, the e107 V Vario, at Agritechnica.

The "V" is for vineyard, and that's the kind of work envisioned for the company's first fully electric specialized tractor.

The battery has a capacity of 100 kilowatt hours and boils down to about 70 horsepower, and the company said it can get between four and seven hours of work on a full charge. Plug it in for 45 minutes over lunch, and it can go from 20% to 80%.

"It'll depend on the work you're doing," said Christoph Bar, a sales engineer with Fendt, of the machine's battery life.

The e107 brings an idea the company had already demonstrated into production. Fendt had displayed its electric e100 model at numerous farm shows in the last year, but that was just a prototype.

There were plenty of challenges baked into bringing the machine to farms. One of them was dealing with the battery.

"The battery, you have to cool it down during the summer, but you have to warm it up during the winter," Bar said. "It's also funny because you have to have it about 30 degrees (Celsius, 86 degrees Fahrenheit) on the battery, but you also have to cool the cab. In some conditions you'll have to heat the battery up and cool the cab down. This was very hard to do."

The machine will be available starting next year in Germany, the Netherlands and Norway. It's not slated to land on U.S. shores until 2026.

"First we have to get all the service guys up on board because they have to have a special certification, so we have to go step by step," Bar said.

Will the e107 be getting any bigger brothers or sisters? Not without some major technological breakthroughs in the world of batteries. Fendt played around with the math and decided it would take 16 tons of battery to sufficiently power a large field tractor through a day's work.

The e107 weighs about 330 pounds more than its diesel-powered cousin of the same size.

"It should work very well in vineyards and specialty crops and also for municipal work," Bar said.

Fendt also introduced the 600 Vario Series of tractors at the show, offering four new models, a 614, 616, 618 and 620. They'll have the company's VisioPlus cab on top and, under the hood, the VarioDrive transmission and the European-emission compliant Agco Power Core50 engine.

Agritechnica is considered the world's leading trade fair for agricultural machinery, and had registered 2,811 exhibitors from 52 countries for this year's event in Hanover, Germany.

Joel Reichenberger can be reached at Joel.Reichenberger@dtn.com

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