The dump truck, at 45 tons, ascends the 13-percent grade and takes on 65 tons of ore. With more than double the weight going back down the hill, the beast’s regenerative braking system recaptures more than enough energy to refill the charge the eDumper used going up.
So the energy this truck uses is harnessed via mining and loading… Essentially this energy was stored in the ore via geological processes.
This truck uses continental drift as his fuel.
In other words, OP’s mom.
Boom
Or in physics terms, potential energy.
Since everything seems to be going downhill right now, how would I harness that power? You telling me the crystal peddling influencers were right all along? 🤣
I’ve seen a cable lift that worked basically like that. It transferred ore down the mountain, so heavy buckets going down lifted the empty buckets back up.
Didn’t Tom Scott make a video about this?
Statistically, yes.
Yep.
I’ve heard of a diesel-electric logging truck that uses this concept as well. Use the batteries going up the mountain empty, charge them again going downhill loaded.
The truck has a penis?
Kinda like the mine in the UK that use a cableway without a motor to bring ore down and empty buckets up
I saw that Tom Scott episode too. I’ll miss him.
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Is that just a gravity battery that just so happens to be a dump truck as well?
So it was designed for this mine I guess?
I’m not sure there’s a lot of mine you’re going down filled up, the images I have in mind are quite the opposite, but that’s a really cool idea!
There actually is some design to stock energy this way, with weights you lift while having excess energy
If you’re thinking of that CGI crane lifting concrete blocks, it’s unfortunately a really bad idea.
Pumped hydro stores energy by lifting weight uphill, instead. Water is basically the cheapest thing you can get per tonne, and is easy to contain and move.
To store useful amounts of energy using gravity, you need pretty large elevation differences and millions of tonnes of mass to move.
I love that I knew this conversation was going to happen as soon as I read the article.
And, yes.
Reminds me of this ropeway thing that Tom Scott covered that doesn’t require power input either, for similar reasons:
Niche application but still cool.
ARGH Why did you have to remind me that Tom Scott is still missing from Youtube!
We achieved perpetuum mobile
Yes, but actually no.
I guess it all depends on the physical layout but this seems like a very complicated way to get material downhill.
EV never has to be recharged… Because it recharges on the way downhill.
“World’s largest EV never has to be plugged in” is sufficiently click-baity without being so dumbly self contradicting
More like “never has to stop working to charge”. It is novel that its charging mechanism operates as a function of doing its primary job.
Not novel. I think there was a train somewhere in Africa, that transported some ore from mountain to port. On the way down with ore it charged and uphill it used charge.
Is novel for a dump truck to use this. Of course it’s not a completely new concept entirely.
That’s genius. Who cares if thermodynamics wins, it weighs less on the way up so works out just fine.
Just like the example in TFA.
Reminds me of some guy with a OneWheel that was saying he’d never charged his board in like a thousand miles as his daily commuter.
He lives near the top of a mountain lift, so he takes it home and just runs on pure regen lol.
So he’s just breaking? What a silly thing to claim. I bet he’s not even regening a lot. When i ride up a mountain until my battery is down to 40% or so and ride down i regenerate around 1% or something. It might even be in the 0.6% or something
I think it’s still pretty cool. Turning potential energy to kenetic
Yeah I was gonna say I’m pretty sure this isn’t a single use, disposable vehicle
“World’s largest EV”
Blatantly untrue. Larger EVs have been in use for more than a century at this point in the form of EMU trains.
The emus have trains now?!
Take that Australia!
Yeah we’re proper fucked tbh
It was part of the treaty. That and the Great Dingo Barrier.
We truly are lost…
I’ll pick up the pedantic torch. Trains are made of train cars, I’d argue each one is a separate car or vehicle even though they’re strapped together.
I feel like The ISS ticks a lot of the boxes for a vehicle though, how big is that?
Sure, but quite often in EMUs the cars come in sets that can’t operate disconnected from each other, so I’d argue that they still comprise a single vehicle.
I’d argue that the ISS, due to lacking means of propulsion (unless you count explosive decompression) is not a vehicle.The ISS has two different propulsion systems and has used them to avoid debris. I don’t think that it has enough power to leave orbit and reach greater altitude.
In that case yeah, I guess it is a vehicle.
This will conversation evolve into two things: are hotdogs and tacos sammiches, and we becoming crabs.
POPTARTS are Calzones. Calzones are Pizzas. Pizzas are Open-Face Sandwiches!
Aka toast
Wow what a great use case.
Reminds of this bucket-line system
I’m pretty sure they’ve been doing this for years in South America already.
Click bait that actually makes me glad I clicked???
You just toss it when the battery dies and get a new one.
Just like a vape stick.
Well yes but it does also recharge itself by going downhill while loaded and storing power from regenerative brakes. Then it drops the load and has enough charge to drive back up. The power is coming from it being loaded at the top.
I know how it works. I was making a joke by applying the concept of disposable e-waste junk to a massive dump truck.
Yes but your comment was in every way indistinguishable from a comment by an idiot who had no idea how it worked, didn’t read the article, and commented an incorrect explanation anyways.
You truly believe someone thought that you would just throw away an entire dump truck when the battery died?
Depends on how easy it is to remove the battery and how many replacement batteries are on the market.
Also a bit of a ship of theseus issue where if the truck gets refurbished by the company then is it the same truck?
These things are very large and very few in number. I know nothing about the company behind its production.
So it is possible.
Perfection is the enemy of the good; climate change is even worse.
Till elon finds out that if he manages to cover the sun, he can charge us on sunscription
Pretty sure its also not solar. The machine gets loaded with weight at the top of the hill, its regenerative brakes store power on the way down, it drops the load off, and the lightened machine stored enough charge to drive back up.
Don’t give hime ideas…
I cannot avoid to be pedantic on this, it is recharged during half the trip… it just does not require plug-like recharging
Yeah another clickbait headline. It’s getting recharged all the time, it’s just very lucky to be in a use case where it goes down hills with large loads all the time
It’s more than a clickbait headline, the first paragraph is just flat out wrong:
Perhaps best of all, it consumes no energy doing it.
Obviously it’s consuming energy going uphill. Just because the power source is gravity doesn’t mean it’s not consuming energy.
well that was unexpected
I’m curious if the desgin team knew about it in advance
Are you asking if Swiss guys knew about mountains? )
hahaha guess it boils down to that 😂
but I was specifically wondering if they built the vehicle with a charger and ended up never using it, to their own surprise. or if they knew they’d (almost) never have to charge it
Must have a cable somewhere as a backup otherwise you’d need a full battery replacement should it ever be discharged.
Gonna go ahead and guess that when designing a 110 ton mega dump truck things are probably pretty front loaded on the planning side of things.
“EDumper” is a great name for a dump truck.
Also my shiny metal ass
Or a very niche onlyfans camgirl
yes it does. just going by the numbers posted operating in the space it does results in a net loss of12% battery each trip.
I read the story.
I saw the comments on the story
I laughed at the pedantic slapfights happening in the comments.
I came here to comment on the neat story and poke fun at the silliness, to find the same pedantic slapfights here.
Sigh.
Very cool! It’s a pretty specialized use case, but still awesome to see.
2017
At 50 tons and 700 kilowatt-hours, this truck is the biggest EV in the world Each round trip will generate 10kWh of spare electricity for the grid.
Cool EV bruh, but can the horn make a fart noise?
