The world’s largest electric vehicle is capable of carrying 65 tons of materials uphill. Yes, the biggest electric vehicle is a 110 tons electric dump truck and it comes in green color.
The electric dump truck belongs to a series of trucks called Komatsu e-dumpers and is manufactured by a Swiss company called Kuhn Schweiz AG. Everything about this truck is outrageous. It employs the biggest battery in an electric vehicle till date, and it generates more energy than it consumes and so forth.
So here’s a quick look at the Komatsu e-dumper.
World’s Largest Electric Vehicle: eDumper
First off, let me talk about the specs of this huge electric dump truck. The eDumper is powered by a humongous 600kWh battery and, for comparison, the Tesla Model S has a 100kWh electric battery.
The truck produces massive amounts of torque. There are no official details given but the company claims that the torque figures are well in the thousands.
The claims by the company are true as the eDumper is able to carry 65 tons of cargo at a quarry site. The cargo usually includes a big limestone weighing in several tons.
The eDumper climbs uphill empty and carries the limestone back to the quarry downhill. This engages regenerative braking. As a result, the battery of the eDumper gets charged during the downhill journey.
On its way back, the electric truck carries a 65-ton cargo which further intensifies the regenerative braking causing the truck’s electric battery to charge even more.
Due to the above cycle of discharging and recharging the battery of the world’s largest electric vehicle, it runs on forever. Meaning there’s no need to stop the truck near a wall socket and plug it in at the end of the day.
So not only does the world’s largest electric vehicle works pollution-free, it is super cheap to operate as well. If used on any construction site, this truck would massively lower the cost of construction or mining.
eDumper Can Even Power The Energy Grid
According to Popular Mechanics, an average dump truck consumes around 11,000 to 12,000 liters of diesel each year. However, Kuhn Schweiz AG says that the eDumper can save up to thousands of liters of diesel each year.
On top of that, the owners of eDumpers can also feel proud of themselves because they will be able to reduce around 199 tons of CO2 released per year.
The benefits just don’t stop here. The eDumper can generate a lot of surplus energy meaning the remaining leftover power from the truck can be used to power an electric grid.
However, we are taking this claim with a pinch of salt because electric grids are several megawatts in size and the small amount of surplus energy generated by the truck won’t be anything game-changing. It is, nevertheless, quite a cool feature.
Nissan also revealed its plans to release a brand new Leaf electric car in Australia. According to the company, the new Nissan Leaf will be able to power people’s homes when it’s not being driven.
The new leaf has a battery of around 40 kWh and it will have a top speed of around 270 km/h. Now it is a 40 kWh battery so we can consider the car’s range to be around 250 miles on a single charge.
Anyway, let’s go back to the eDumper that is based on another Diesel dump truck, also manufactured by the same company.
The Diesel truck on which the world’s largest electric vehicle is based on is called the Komatsu Dump Truck HD605-8. It has 6-feet high tires and produces a whopping 778 KW of maximum power.
Despite all that, nothing can beat the ‘cool-factor’ of the world’s largest electric dump truck.
So what do you think? Are electric dump trucks cool or not?
