So, who came out best?
Ergonomics – the engineer’s word for how efficient a design is – is difficult to judge scientifically. There are no figures to work with, no way of measuring how good or bad a feature is and, at the end of the day, one driver will like certain features while another may prefer completely different ones.
So we have tried to measure each function on every tractor on its own individual merits. This involved the test team approaching each tractor in the same way – as if we had never driven them before and hadn’t looked at the handbook.
These results are nonetheless subjective. If you have driven a Fendt all your life, you’ll know what all the gadgets and gizmos do. If you want simplicity, you’ll appreciate the layout of the JCB. If you’ve only ever had Massey Ferguson tractors, then SV1 and DTM will seem a walk in the park.
But for many farmers and contractors (and with the size of these tractors – there will be plenty of contractors with these machines) there will be times when a student or new operator has to jump on the machine and go. And if you need a degree in computer science to do this, it’s less likely that the tractor will be running anywhere near as efficiently as the manufacturer intended it to.
The target for most manufacturers is to supply the most sophisticated features in a logical, straightforward way. And it’s this that we’ve based our scores on below.