I keep waiting for the electric tractor. In the 25-30 hp class you can get reasonable runtime from a battery. Sure a Tesla can run for 4 hours on a full charge - but on the highway it is likely only using about 25 horsepower of fuel, it would run for much less time if continuously using all of the several hundred horsepower it can deliver on a track.

As a small land owner I don't think I could find a way to put 2 hours on my tractor in a day, so that I need to recharge overnight after 2 hours of use isn't even a loss. And not having to deal with diesel would be a big savings.

Depending on what is being done; it would seem like a 25-50hp electrical system with a little 5-10kw diesel generator would work great. You're almost never running these things at truly 100% duty cycle, so you just need a way to bank the power.

Edison Motors up in Canida is going this with OTR trucks for the logging industry.

For sure. I often think about this when using my tractor to clean up trees I've taken down, for which there is a lot of grab, lift, hop off, chainsaw, repeat. Or really any kind of hoisting/positioning where the engine is just sitting idle to occasionally move hydraulics.

Via HN a little while back, I came across a guy importing electric versions of things like front loaders, forklifts, excavators, etc. Intriguing, but less compelling if you have to buy 2-4 pieces of equipment rather than one jack-of-all-trades. Although if I were going to have to maintain multiple pieces of equipment, I'd definitely prefer them to be electric!

I can end up putting in more than 2 hours a day, but I think the math still works out for most homeowner use. I think the main thing it doesn't work out great for is long dirt-engaging operations like for actually farming a large field. But it's not like the subcompacts are really made for that either, and they're quite popular.

It would be really interesting to see what could be done with linear actuators instead of hydraulics, too. Although I suspect heat dissipation would be a problem, and working on hydraulics is pretty cool in and of itself.