They had one at the LICA show in Iowa a couple of years ago, I had a little seat time in it, its different, they were advertising it as a high speed finish dozer, coupled with gps and automatics it did work fine leveling off dirt and making a final pass to clean stuff up. Not sure who has enough of that perticular kind of work to justify it, but aside from that if did a good job for what it was intended for. No I have no intentions of owning one but its just JD's way to expand into another area and test the waters, can't say its right or wrong, just different.
The sales rep those days was talking it up for dirt work, not rock or anything hard, basically everyone was using it to do high speed clean up behind larger dozers and finish work, the rep claimed they were targeting the road crew type final grading instead of a slower dozer they would use this to do a lot higher speed final pass and use gps to control it and get millimeter accuracy at high speed. I don't do anything like that so don't shoot the messanger here but thats what we were told, if he was full of bs then so be it, but thats the sales line he was using, just stating a fact of how it was explained to us there.
The question was asked about pulling pans and he said thats not its intended purpose but might be able to do some of it with a small pan, again I don't do that kind of work so I don't know anything about that. They even used it to level the haul raods and keep them smoother and did it at high speed.
I'd say the consensus there was it was different and left a lot of people wondering, just like on here but then again there has been a lot of machines over the years invented that did the same thing when introduced and some caught on big, others a dismall failure, only time will tell, but I do know none went home with anyone there those days after they demo'ed it.
I overheard some farmers talking and they were impressed with in, those guys used rubber tracked tractors and were coming up with a list of uses I'd never thought of and they were very impressed from the sounds of it, they were asking questions about all sorts of options and possibilities. most dirt workers left scratching their heads and didn't say much other than "well that was different" just like me.
What its exactly used for or will find a nitche for I don't know other than it'll probably never be used in my operation and I moved on. I know this has been a hot button for a lot of people and I'm not sure why, it was at the field day there too, other than something totally different I guess it made no difference to me, I'd actually forgot about it until it keeps coming up here and gets beat to death each time.
