The Largest Electric Vehicle Is A Dump That Runs On Rocks And Gravity

The world’s largest electric vehicle is actually a dump truck. And it runs on rocks!

The Swiss company, eMining, has released the eDumper which is a gigantic battery-powered dump truck. As the name might suggest, it’s completely electric.

It’s a 65-ton truck powered by a 600-kilowatt-hour battery pack that has six times the capacity of any electric car on the market. Similar to other electric vehicles, it still needs to be able to turn its motors into generators that recharge the battery when it slows down. However, this is where the charging method gets creative.

At the moment, the truck is being used in a quarry where it has to be driven up a hill, is filled with 45 tons of lime, and then goes back down to be unloaded. The weight of the rocks generates enough energy fighting gravity to charge the battery pack to 88% on the way down and only needs 80% to get back up. At the end of the day, it still has a 200-kilowatt hour surplus.

While this technology is awesome and may be used in the future, right now it costs around $1 million to build something like this.