It's slightly less impressive when you realise they could have built a massive slide instead and got mostly the same result.
Guess it's better than a massive diesel truck though.
Cool EV bruh, but can the horn make a fart noise?
"EDumper" is a great name for a dump truck.
Or a very niche onlyfans camgirl
Also my shiny metal ass
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.
Very cool! It's a pretty specialized use case, but still awesome to see.
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.
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.
I hope OpenTTD devs consider adding gravity-based electric transportation of heavy loads as an option
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
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.
But it does recharge. And does need to be recharged.
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.
Oh cool they're using the same principle the guys at Edison are using for their logging trucks on a much larger scale
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