16 productivity. “It was easily the best vehicle on the market,” smiles Wanner. “The customers went from ‘Who’s John Deere?’ to ‘Oh my gosh, this lets me do stuff I didn’t think was possible!’” Innovation through electrification The loader remains one of Wanner’s most satisfying projects – but it was just the start of an innovation journey that has seen John Deere release an ever-growing range of new vehicles that embrace electrification in many different ways. Having led the team that developed the motor drives and the inverters for the first release, Wanner shifted focus from supervision to pure technical developer, exploring what to electrify next. The following year saw the company release an innovative row crop planter, named ExactEmerge. This dramatically improved upon the traditional approach of dropping seeds based on ground speed metering through use of two electric motors and some cleverly developed smart controls to carefully place seeds in the ground with a level of precision previously impossible – enabling customers to plant some seeds twice as fast as they did before. “The old random drop and roll process limited how fast you could plant because some seeds would end up too close together or too far apart and that hurts the yield,” offers Wanner. “The system we developed uses one motor to meter out seeds per second and another one to turn a brush belt with bristles that spin to perfectly compensate for ground speed, holding the seeds and conveying them to the ground so they drop in perfectly.” It was another demonstration of how the innovative use of electrification could change the game – with smart technology also enabling it to change planting speeds to compensate for corners and, in a subsequent upgrade, to precisely squirt fertiliser directly on the seed as it is planted, rather than spraying in a continuous stream, reducing the volume used by two thirds and saving even more time and money while also reducing environmental impact. “Our customers don’t care it’s electric; they don’t care about all the technology; all they care about is that this planter rocks,” he enthuses. “Most don’t realise all the calculations that are going on under the hood, they just know that it enables them to plant at 10 mph rather than 5 mph and still have perfect spacing – so they can buy one rig instead of two, have one operator instead of two and get twice as much work done in a planting weather window.” The electrification process has now become a two-pronged attack, with one eye on creating new vehicles and another on advancing alreadyelectrified solutions through the use of less expensive or better performing components or the development of new concepts to take to market. Wanner adds: “The idea is once you’ve got this level of precision and control, what’s the next level? What’s the next solution? “It turns out that electrification really enables a lot of this because it’s smart, it’s fast, it’s controllable, it’s highly efficient, it’s load-sensing and it enables things like more automated systems or even autonomous operation. That’s really been the fun thing in my career – developing all these different competencies and working out how we can solve customer challenges with that technology.” Leaping forward In 2022, John Deere announced plans to rapidly expand its focus on electrification through its ‘Leap Ambitions’ commitment. Its approach was to stick with the gameplan and to do electrification not just for the sake of it, but to develop solutions that make sense, do a job better or do things that had never been done before. That is now coming to fruition, with Wanner leading the development of a broad swathe of new products. “We’re developing technologies like GPS guidance, precision sensing, machine learning, electrification – the whole technology stack – which can then be applied to all of our different vehicles in construction, forestry and agriculture,” he explains. “Electrification is the combination of control, precision, efficiency and enabling things like autonomy. With electronic controls, we can respond faster and do things better – but it won’t just be every vehicle electrified; you’re going to see a wave of applications coming that really make sense. “In the past, we were releasing one vehicle per year with electrification, learning, growing competency, and understanding different power levels and different capabilities. We’ve been doing that for 20 years now and we’re really able to leverage that; we’re at a maturity scale where we can take all these things and rapidly apply them to new vehicle forms, so the number January/February 2026 | E-Mobility Engineering The ingenious ExactEmerge solution uses electrification to revolutionise the planting process – precisely delivering seeds and spraying with fertiliser with the ExactShot upgrade In conversation | Kent Wanner
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MjI2Mzk4