Electrify Agriculture: Concept Design for Electric Tractors Based on Customer-Relevant Properties

Agriculture is responsible for up to a quarter of all greenhouse gas emissions, and agricultural machinery plays a significant role in this through the combustion of fossil fuels. To mitigate the impact of agricultural machinery, electrification of tractors is a promising way to gain fast impact. With the emergence of tractor electrification, new paths for tractor design innovation open up, driven by the newly gained design freedom. To address the requirements of such a complex machine, we emphasize putting the farmer at the center of development. This work presents a methodology to translate customer-relevant properties for agricultural tractors with a novel two-track method to early-stage tractor concepts for battery-electric tractors. The first track of our methodology develops qualitative concept decisions based on expert interviews, while the second track derives the technical functionalities in a quantitative manner with data from a tractor market analysis. We guide through the application of the methodology with a case study-specific farming scenario.