(ET) Mother Earth comments.

[DRicH1937 aol com]

>From the Mother Earth Web Page:



Do you know of any company making electrical garden tractors?
Will
Coarsegold, California 



 Hi Will, 
We don't know of a commercially viable electric tractor being made by an 
established firm today. Well-meaning folks are always converting proven 
golf-cart or electric-fork-lift machinery to tractors, but the cost of 
high-capacity motors and batteries is too high to compete with 
gas-engine-driven models. The obvious environmental and power-input 
advantages won't convince enough buyers to pay ten times what a zippy 
little 
John Deere lawn or garden tractor costs. 

General Electric made the ElecTrac lawn-tractor/riding-mower in the 1970s, 
but lost their shirts on every sale and discontinued the line years ago. 
You 
can find used ElecTracs for sale at well under $1,000. They were robustly 
made, and parts are still available. But they are slow, underpowered for 
attachments, heavy, too low-slung to use in the garden row, and run time 
is 
inadequate to mow a big lawn on a single charge. Your neighbor with a 
gas-engine-powered lawn tractor with its three-blade mower buzzing can 
literally run circles around you on your plodding ElecTrac. The fact that 
the 
ElecTrac is nonpolluting doesn't hold for much in the status-conscious 
suburbs where most lawn and garden tractors are sold. 

You'll note that, except for GM's EV (which they will lease only), the 
major 
auto manufacturers have abandoned electric cars and gone to hybrid 
gas/electric or diesel/electric cars and trucks. The feeling is that fuel 
cells will become practical and economical before storage-battery-powered 
electric vehicles do so. 

One man in your state who has built a prototype solar-powered tractor you 
can 
check out is: 

Steve Heckeroth
Homestead Enterprises: Solar Design and Renewable Energy Products
30151 Navarro Ridge
Albion, CA 95410
phone/fax: (707) 937-0338 
www.renewables.com/ETractorSpecs.htm
tractor renewables com 

We're with you, Will. Where we garden, in northern New England, most of 
our 
electricity comes down from Quebec's Hydro water-powered generators. Here, 
an 
electric tractor wouldn't even generate secondhand pollution. 

Keep looking; the technology will catch up to us some time. 

Mother 

 
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