If you were wondering, here’s the world’s Biggest Electric vehicle

If you were thinking that the world’s largest electric vehicle was an intercity bus, you would be very wrong. This here is the eDumper, a 45-ton mining dump truck that holds the title of world’s largest electric vehicle.

Introduced in 2019, the eDumper, as you would have guessed, is a dump truck powered by batteries. The battery size is 700 kWh (23x size of a Tata Nexon’s battery) and weighs (wait for it) a massive 8 tons. And that’s just the battery alone.

The truck is employed in a quarry in Biel, Switzerland and can haul up to 65 tons of load. And hear this, the eDumper doesn’t consume any energy while hauling all that weight around. This is because after the truck ascends up the mountain at 13 per cent grade and gets loaded up, its brakes regenerate massive amounts of energy and charge up the battery as the truck descends. The regenerative braking sends back more to the battery than the energy consumed by the truck going up!

Lucas di Grassi, the 2017 Formula E championship winner, had a test drive of the eDumper in 2019 and came back pleasantly surprised with the truck’s regenerative abilities. The truck was at 90 per cent battery charge when they went up and after the climb, the battery was at 80 per cent. After loading up and coming down, the truck recollected 8 per cent energy with the battery standing at 88 per cent power.  

The eDumper is manufactured by Kuhn Schweiz and eMining and is based on the Komatsu HB 605-7 dump truck. It measures 30 feet in length, 14 feet in width and 14 feet in height. The truck can be charged completely in 10 hours with a 100 kW charging station.

According to Kuhn Schwei, the eDumper produces 200 kWh of surplus energy every day, which equals to 77 mWh per year, saving 196 metric tons of CO2 a year.