Heavy-duty electric dump truck being developed ( Source: Empa website )

According to reports, this electric car that is being transformed is funded by a Swiss consortium company and experts from the Swiss Federal Material Testing and Research Laboratory are responsible for its operational safety.

The expert refitted a heavy-duty diesel dump truck manufactured by Komatsu Group (KOMATSU) and converted it into an all-electric mine vehicle prototype, hoping to transport materials in a more environmentally friendly manner.

The transformation involves dismantling the original diesel engine and making room for the giant battery pack in two parts. Among them, the battery pack consists of 1,400 nickel-manganese-cobalt batteries and has a storage capacity of 700 kWh. According to scientists from the Swiss Federal Materials Testing and Research Laboratory and the Kuhn Group, this will be the largest battery pack for land vehicles.

After the conversion, the prototype vehicle will be put into a load-carrying test - 20 round trips a day, carrying 65 tons of load each time. Each transport, the energy recovery device can be used to charge the battery pack - not only is sufficient to deal with the return of the mountain road, but can even return the remaining power to the power grid. On a downhill slope, the power plant will recharge the battery pack with up to 3000 amps of current, filling it with 40 kilowatt-hours of electricity, and thus earning a net profit of 10 kWh per trip. The amount of power generated can be used for no-load climbing, so there is no reduction in the amount of electricity generated by a round trip.

Experts say that even under the harshest environmental conditions, vehicles can still operate on slopes with a gradient of 13%. At present, Swiss companies are testing the car further.

For electric vehicles, retrofitting with dump trucks is a completely new field, so the research team will pay close attention to the performance of the modified prototype and see if it will fail. This will mean that the vehicle will be subjected to battery overcharge tests, and in the case of nickel-manganese-cobalt batteries destroyed with steel nails, check the battery's response.

Marcel Held, a battery expert at the Swiss federal materials testing and research laboratory, said in his talks about the next generation of electric vehicles that nickel-manganese-cobalt batteries will also be the choice for the German automotive industry.

If the prototype vehicle passes all tests, the Swiss Federal Institute of Materials Testing and Research indicates that eight prototype all-electric mine vehicle prototypes can be used at the same time in the cement plant. Prototype vehicles will also open up new areas for large construction machinery, such as tunnels or residential areas that are sensitive to exhaust gas and noise.