Kubota's look into the future of equipment

Neil from Messick's here to share with you some special areas from Kubota's recent 50th anniversary dealer meeting. This area here was set off to the side to feature some of the forward-looking models that Kubota is working on. We all know electrification is coming to equipment here in different ways, and this area showcased some of the work that Kubota is doing in that regard. Join me here this morning and we'll take a look at the future of the equipment business.
We're going to start with this new LX tractor, as this is the closest to being an actual product. The model number here is LXE261, and this is an electrified battery version of what is today's LX2610. This tractor is actually headed for some kind of sale. Kubota did recently put out a press release that in Europe these things are going to be available for long-term rental to municipalities and those kinds of organizations.
Municipal use of small tractors is actually kind of the predominant thing over in Europe. You see a lot of equipment like this being used for property maintenance and that kind of stuff by municipalities, and much less personal ownership of compact tractors like we typically see here in the United States. The long-term rental to this is interesting. That kind of tells you that Kubota is going to be maintaining ownership of these tractors, and thinks of this as a large-scale prototype testing phase. This is my own reading between the lines, not anything that I know specifically about the company.
If you look at this tractor here, you're going to notice those European flares that you see on small tractors, things like the setup of the seats and the mirrors and the rops. These are all European implementations of this tractor. This is likely the machine that's headed out into that market. This is probably going to be one of the first places that we see a compact tractor coming to market. There's limitations in battery runtime and that kind of stuff that we're keeping a lookout for, but there's going to be uses where these are probably going to make sense and make their way to market.
This looks like it's probably one of the closest machines out of the four that we're going to discuss here as far as actually coming to retail. Next up is this Z2E electric zero-turn mower. This is kind of like a concept machine. When engineers are going through and developing what these new models look like, some of the perspective here is look what we can do. Look what kind of machine that we could produce. You see here, there's some things about this that are pretty forward-looking. The way that the wheels are set up, the design of it, the control panels on the side.
Interesting, when you come around the back of the machine, it looks like the batteries are just dropped here in the back. We anticipate here when products first come to market, there's going to be some things about them that are maybe a little crude, that are going to take another model generation, a little bit more iteration before we start to see truly retail-ready machines that meet all of the expectations that we have of equipment today.
While Kubota's not shipping a zero-turn like this right now, there are several companies that are, including some ones that we sell. We continue to take a pretty conservative approach to that as we do hear some issues with actual real-world ownership of electric zero-turns at this point. Happy that companies like Kubota tend to take a pretty slow and methodical approach to releasing new models like this as opposed to rushing things to market. We're going to be really happy to sell this kind of stuff. It looks like it has some cool potential, but I would much rather sell a product that's going to meet our customers' expectations rather than stuff that may have service issues.
Interesting to see how a machine like this has kind of developed over the years. You come up with this concept and then refine it until you have something ready for sale. Next up is this electric mini-excavator. As I understand, this is also going to start to see some field testing, maybe light retail happening in Europe before it comes here to the US. This is likely a machine where I think electric actually could play out pretty well. We have some concerns of draining batteries really quickly in things that have heavy constant loads. Think PTO work and mowing, things where you have this constant load on the engine, it's constant demand for horsepower.
Something like an excavator, where your demand from your power system, from your engine can be really peaky. You need a lot of power as you're dragging this boom through the dirt, but once you're out of the trench and you're simply lifting and craning, you don't need so much horsepower anymore. The peaky demand like that can be cases where electrification kind of can make sense and probably is a little bit easier to implement because you don't need such a large kilowatt-hour battery in order to pull it off.
These are getting close, and generally this kind of equipment is highly reliable. I think this is one that we can probably start to see go to market with very little issue. It will be interesting to see how these things price and stuff too when they first come out. Neat to see this concept and this idea of making its progress towards an actual retail-ready machine. I don't even know what to call this thing. A concept tractor? I guess that's exactly what this is.
Kubota has explained here that they expect to see several phases as things are electrified and all this technology is applied to these models. First is really just going through and updating an existing machine to have these new powertrains. The second phase will be iterating on that idea. Then the third phase really would be looking at that machine and thinking, can it be reimagined in some kind of way? That's what this is here. This is, say, a reimagining of today's tractor and saying, what could this be? What kind of crazy stuff could we build? To be clear, as I understand, this is a non-functional machine, as insane-looking and awesome-looking as it is.
It's not a functional working prototype. It is more of a showpiece. But kind of a nod to where we could see machines go in the future. Is this, you know, 15, 20 years off, something like that? It probably could be, if we kind of know how product cycles and that kind of stuff goes. Many companies are starting to tease this idea of tractors and machines out working in fields that don't have an operator behind them. I'm excited to see where this stuff goes. Just to be abundantly clear, none of what we're looking at here is available for purchase today, but should give you some idea of the engineering that's expected to see in the future.
I have a lot of respect for the people that go through and create these machines, engineer this stuff. The one thing that always has impressed me about Kubota and their products is when they come to market, they don't rush it. They're never going to be the first. But when they come out, you know it's going to be done right. I definitely respect them for that, taking a slower approach to bringing some of this stuff out, but knowing when they do it, they hit the market right, they get the products right, and it's a company that always seems to deliver high-quality products for us. I'm happy for that and excited to see where they're going. Shopping for a piece of equipment that we happen to produce today, or you have parts or service needs for a machine you've already got, give us a call here at Messick's. We're available at 800-222-3373 or online at messicks.com.