Friday, 26 June 2020 09:56

Tiny Jimny hits the right note

Written by Mark Daniel

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Suzuki Jimny.

Strong demand for the instantly recognised Suzuki Jimny in New Zealand has continued to accelerate with the 1000th retail order recently confirmed and available shipments pre-sold for nine months.

Declared the 2019 World Urban Car in New York, named one of the top three finalists in the World Car Design of the Year and named winner of a British game-changer award last year, the diminutive four-wheel-drive Jimny appears to be one of a few cars that has no peers.

Independent critics rated the 3.48-metre long Suzuki as fun, innovative and “a fantastic piece of practical design in an era of big and heavy SUVs.

Unlike most modern cars, Jimny has a rigid ladder frame, high ground clearance and part time 4WD system with low range transfer gear.

At the heart of the car is a 1.5 litre, 16-valve engine, while the model is available with either a four-stage automatic transmission or five speed manual gearbox.

Standard equipment includes limited-slip differential traction control, hill hold and hill descent functions, cruise control and speed limiter.

Lane departure warning, weaving alert, headlight high beam assist, autonomous emergency braking and six airbags are also included in Jimmy’s specification.

“There has been no reduction in buyer enthusiasm since the fourth generation Jimny arrived on our shores a year ago, despite an order bank and customers having to wait,” said Gary Collins, general manager of automobile marketing for Suzuki New Zealand.

“The volume of sales is purely a reflection of our allocation and we could clearly have registered more sales had we been able to secure extra units,” said Collins

The Jimny, backed by a five-year warranty package, has already earned a high ranking for strong residual values, and in Britain, leading industry specialists CAP Automotive forecasts the model’s “very slow depreciation and good retained value” offers good peace of mind to owners.

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Lely offerings for the future

Dutch robotic specialist Lely launched a new farm management application called Horizon at its recent Future Farm Days 2020.

Designed to connect data from a range of on-farm equipment and suppliers into one management system, it creates a real-time decision-support platform, to make the farmer’s life easier, the herd healthier and the farm more profitable, says Lely.

Developed over a 24-month period, with over 100 test farmers in seven countries, working with 75 engineers, designers, farm management advisors, veterinarians and AI specialists, the new application will eventually replace the current Lely T4C management system. It uses smart algorithms and the cloud to deliver data that is processed into actionable information that is always accessible on any device in a user-friendly way.

Lely claims the Horizon application unburdens farmers from routine decision making and helps them optimise their workloads, using integrated routines based on easily scheduled cow ‘touches’, create logical and more efficient workflows. It is also possible to assign a certain task to an employee and to schedule a time slot for the cow touch, rather than analysing different reports and filtering long lists.

Horizon is also able to connect and combine data from non-Lely sources into a complete solution for the farmer removing the need to enter the same data twice, while scrutinising individual data streams in different applications will no longer be necessary. Currently, connections with farming applications such as Dairy Comp, Uniform-Agri, CRV and Herde already enable farmers to synchronise information about calving and inseminations between applications. Lely’s ambition is to connect with more partners over time, to hand the farmer more smart data.

To ensure full support in the migration to Lely Horizon, existing Lely T4C customers will be personally informed by their Lely Center before the end of 2020.

The migration is planned in a phased approach, from country to country, over the year 2021.

Also launched at the event, Lely Exos is an autonomous concept for harvesting and feeding fresh grass to the herd.

The company suggests that feeding fresh grass makes better use of available roughage, suggesting “fresh” has between 10 and 20% more nutritional value than grass silage, as there are minimal losses typically seen during mowing, tedding, raking, harvesting and feeding.

Lely suggests that feeding fresh grass over an extended season reduces the amount of silage that has to be conserved, reduces the need for concentrates and bought-in feed and increase the margin made on each litre of milk produced.

Based around an all-electric vehicle that mows and feeds, Exos is light weight and uses soil friendly technology, that can be exploited throughout the growing season. Design to work 24/7 as feed requirements change, the system places no constraints on labour or time, while it is also designed to work in tandem with the Lely Vector automatic feeding systems.

In operation, Exos also collects field data as it goes about its job, giving framers live data on grass supply and lending itself to a further concept of delivering a targeted liquid fertiliser as it passes over a harvested area.

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