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
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.
The truck has a penis?
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
I guess it all depends on the physical layout but this seems like a very complicated way to get material downhill.
We achieved perpetuum mobile
Yes, but actually no.
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
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
Click bait that actually makes me glad I clicked???
Wow what a great use case.
Reminds of this bucket-line system
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
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.
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
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 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.
yes it does. just going by the numbers posted operating in the space it does results in a net loss of12% battery each trip.
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)
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.
Well sure but if you just dump ore onto a ramp/chute then you’re constained to high angles and material so it can’t also double as a drivable road.
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 seems like an opportunity for vehicle-to-vehicle charging, putting the power gained from gravity into another vehicle.
It would need to happen quickly and at the same time as unloading and it would have to keep enough energy to climb the hill plus a safety margin.
It powers a massage chair for the driver
