Ventrac 45RC

[MountainBuck]

Has anyone tried the new radio controlled Ventrac 45RC?

I see that it has a camera on the remote control and I'm wondering how intuitive it works.

Also, anyone see a price tag?

 

[Chris616]

Aaron Graber mentions in one of the videos a “starting retail price of $62.K” and that it would be available in January, 2025.

I was curious why Ventrac would produce the 45RC. Using a radio control (RC) is more difficult that sitting in the operator’s seat, because the visibility isn’t as good, regardless of the fact that it has a video feed. There are other benefits to operating from the seat, so why would someone choose to use the RC instead? I suppose that for some small number of people sitting in the seat for hours can be uncomfortable, but they’ll be standing for hours instead. In some situations it can be less dusty, etc. But…the maximum slope angle that the machine can operate on isn’t going to be any greater without an onboard operator. There is less danger for the operator when operating on a 30° slope, but for my personal (very expensive) machine I wouldn’t be any more inclined to send it on a marginal slope via RC than with me locally operating it. Maybe that isn’t the case for commercial operators of the machine.

There are so many RC dedicated slope mowers that can work at angles far steeper than a Ventrac (example below), so it seems unlikely that anyone would buy the Ventrac 45RC just for high angle slope work.

Now, if the 45RC was GPS enabled like robot lawnmowers so that it could cut a big field on its own without operator control then that would have been a big labour saver. Maybe that’ll be in the next version.

This new machine seems to me like a solution to a problem that didn’t exist.

Chris

Spider slope mowers | slope-mower.com