What you are looking at is an electric vehicle and quite an impressive one because it is the world’s largest EV in the shape of a 110-pound dump truck known as Elektro Dumper. The dump truck is being used for hauling lime and marlstone – that contains silt and sand – from the mountains in Switzerland.
The material is then taken to a cement factory directly. The most impressive engineering feat, though? Elektro Dumper doesn’t need to be charged, ever. But how does that work? Allow us to explain! The Elektro Dumper weighs in at 45 tons and ascends a hill at a 13 percent grade, in a particular scenario. On its way back, the Elektro Dumper weighs more than twice its weight while carrying 65 tons of ore. It has ‘regenerative braking system’ that is capable of capturing the energy that is created while traveling downhill, thus filling up the battery for the next upward trip.
The Elektro Dumper has been created by the German manufacturer, Kuhn Schweitz. Kuhn Schweitz calls it eDumper for short. It was modeled on a Komatsu HB 605-7 – a huge dump truck that is about 30 feet in length, 14 feet in width, and stands at the height of 14 feet. The tires of Komatsu HB 605-7 are six feet high and the dump bed, when fully extended, is about 28 feet. The stock dump truck was painted green, and a 600-kilowatt-hour battery was incorporated into the vehicle. This battery is enough to power six long-range Tesla Model S cars.
Kuhn Schweitz said that twenty trips of Elektro Dumper from the quarry to the cement factory create a surplus of 200 kilowatt-hours of energy which is the equivalent of 77 megawatt-hours per year. In comparison, the average dump truck consumes 11,000-22,000 gallons of diesel fuel every year. The math is quite straightforward, right?
