World's largest EV never has to be recharged

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.
- 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.
- 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.
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.
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
- Depends on the scale of "going down". Many mines are in the mountains and the material has to be brought down to lower elevations. The mine entry may be lower than the nearest pass but still a lot higher than the destination of the ore.
- 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.
Reminds me of this ropeway thing that Tom Scott covered that doesn't require power input either, for similar reasons:
https://youtu.be/6RiYXI1Tfu4
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.

Amateurs.

The 1963 Černý Důl – Kunčice nad Labem aerial ropeway is over 8 km (5 mi) long, over 30 m high in places and carries 135 tons of limestone every hour from a quarry to the nearest train station. Its 120kW 3-phase synchronous motor requires power for a few minutes at the start and end of each day when most of the 800kg-capacity trolleys are empty, and spends most of the shift generating mains electricity and acting as a speed governor. Unlike the EV, it is fully autonomous most of the way, only 5 people are required to operate it. (Loading, unloading and timed dispatching is automatic, arriving/leaving carts just need to be checked; a safety latch has to be manually dis/engaged on trolleys passing the check.) The quarry will continue operation as long as it pays off, then the ropeway will be scrapped (projected 2033). A dude illegally rode the way up on it somewhat recently. He could have fallen to his death if he pulled the latch.

I wouldn't be surprised if there are electrified railway lines doing the same. Regenerate large amounts of energy into the grid while descending loaded; consume a relatively small amount of energy to haul the empty train back uphill.
- Paywall article, but this already exists in Australia for pretty much the same use case: https://www.railtech.com/rolling-stock/2022/03/04/australian-mining-company-works-on-infinity-train-using-gravity-to-regenerating-batteries/?gdpr=deny
- An early version of the Petřín ropeway in Prague used to contain tanks in both cars. The upper one would be filled with ~~sewage~~ collected rainwater from the city's hilltop quarter and the energy of the descent was used to pull the other car up. Additionally, the way up cost twice as much so there was an incentive to ascend on foot, which was about as fast despite the incline.
- I don't know about going downhill in general, but there are some that use regenerative braking (regular braking, on flat terrain) so maybe
- Most mines are underground so for most this can't work, but where it does they are sure to use it.
Content aside, what a great video! It's not that old of a video but it reminds me so much of early YouTube, just friends messing around and posting it with top tier song choice.
Damn, that shit is even hotter
There's also one in the UK Tom Scott did a video on.
- I know, this one is shorter and has mechanical brakes. Not as great but I imagine the Czech one, one of the largest in Europe, has very few English-language sources that could have pointed it out to him. I don't know whether the Claughton one cannot be ridden or Tom is just squeamish about safety (see description) but the Černý Důl one definitely can, that's how they do routine inspections.

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.
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
Yeah I was gonna say I'm pretty sure this isn't a single use, disposable vehicle
I think it's still pretty cool. Turning potential energy to kenetic

Wow what a great use case.

Reminds of this bucket-line system
- Not very smart that they waste all that energy in mechanical brakes. See my comment (the one with the picture) for a way bigger and electricity-generating ropeway, including a video of a guy less squeamish than Tom Scott riding most of the 45-minute way up.
I'm pretty sure they've been doing this for years in South America already.

Click bait that actually makes me glad I clicked???

"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!
- We truly are lost...
- Yeah we're proper fucked tbh
- It was part of the treaty. That and the Great Dingo Barrier.
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?
- This will conversation evolve into two things: are hotdogs and tacos sammiches, and we becoming crabs.
- 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.~~
Bagger 288 is also electrically driven. Even if it is connected by cable to a nearby powerplant.

You just toss it when the battery dies and get a new one.

Just like a vape stick.
Well yes but it does 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.
Perfection is the enemy of the good; climate change is even worse.

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 times
- 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
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

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.

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.

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.

https://arstechnica.com/cars/2017/09/this-cement-quarry-dump-truck-will-be-the-worlds-biggest-electric-vehicle/

Very cool! It's a pretty specialized use case, but still awesome to see.

Cool EV bruh, but can the horn make a fart noise?

I hope OpenTTD devs consider adding gravity-based electric transportation of heavy loads as an option

yes it does. just going by the numbers posted operating in the space it does results in a net loss of12% battery each trip.

Does it discharge extra energy into anything else? Does it burn off extra energy as heat to maintain regenerative braking?

Great question.
That is definitely one of the big caveats of BEVs over diesels. A battery on an EV can only take in so much energy. Once you hit that ceiling, the battery won't take in any more current. Fun fact, having a super charged battery in a BEV causes all sorts of headache and can cost you performance.
You either have to switch back to service brakes or, as you mentioned, burn off energy as heat. Not sure how they're doing it with this truck, but on other BEV loaders which I've worked on, we add a hydraulic valve whose only purpose is to create flow, pressure, and subsequently heat. It basically just adds a dummy load. I suspect they tapped into the dump hydraulics and added such a valve for this truck.
It powers a massage chair for the driver

Marl is an earthy material rich in carbonate minerals, clays, and silt. When hardened into rock, this becomes marlstone. It is formed in marine or freshwater environments, often through the activities of algae.

Stupid title. It recharges every trip.

It is very obvious they meant it draws no power from the grid. And it doesn't, indeed, acting fully autonomously.
- I don't really care what they meant. They're being deliberately ambiguous for clicks.

I'm no phycisist but I'd bet that the claim "it consumes no energy" is almost certainly false. I get what they mean but this isn't exactly a honest way to describe it.

Strictly speaking, the energy it consumes is the gravitational potential energy of the ore they're mining, which would be consumed anyway in the form of, well, gravity, acting on the ore on the way down. They're just using it productively instead of dissipating it as heat from the brakes. Using only energy that ordinarily would have been wasted is of course very neat, but it's not breaking any laws of physics.
~~energy is converted and never destroyed so it's true~~
I think it means that the net energy consumption is zero. It can use energy, but it generates enough to offset it.

Very interesting use case but kind of dependant on this very specific setup? I feel like an even more efficient and low maintenance method would be like... a ramp.

Esisyphus

Oh cool they're using the same principle the guys at Edison are using for their logging trucks on a much larger scale

This is very fucking cool.

No one commenting on the fact that the first paragraph says it doesn't even CONSUME energy????

Technically it would be impossible to consume energy unless converting it into mass (or time I guess but thats purely theoretical)

They must be hauling the load downhill, what about the ones that hauls the load up from an open-pit mine?

Back in my day we drove back and forth to work uphill, both ways, and we only lost weight because we could never afford enough Starbucks and avocado toast!

A 600 kwh battery pack so... Rocks can roll down hill? Galaxy brain moment.

Probably a lot less safe (and harder to aim) if you don't use the truck. Also unlikely they get all the way down unless you mine it in wheel shapes (increasing labor and also, luckily, danger).
Are you surprised by the concept of potential energy?
Genuinely, I cannot tell what your point is. In some alternate universe, are we just rolling the rocks downhill? Don't you think we'd already be doing that? This seems like a great use case to replace diesel trucks with ones that recharge themselves using potential energy from ore. This absolutely is a galaxy brain moment, in that it's a very smart idea.