The e-Truck that Never Needs Charging
Meet the eDumper
Imagine an electric vehicle that never visits a charger, not once, and actually finishes most days with more energy than it started with. It sounds like a scam you’d scroll past on social media. But it’s real, it’s bright green, and it lives in a Swiss quarry.
The eDumper started life as a Komatsu HD605-7, a conventional diesel dump truck of the kind you’d see in any big mine. Swiss engineering firm Kuhn Schweiz converted it to run purely on electricity, working with battery maker Lithium Storage and the Eastern Switzerland University of Applied Sciences.
The numbers are absurd in the best way. The truck is about nine metres long and over four metres tall, with tyres taller than most people. It weighs roughly 45 tonnes empty and carries around 65 tonnes of rock. Its 600 kWh battery pack weighs about four tonnes on its own and holds roughly the capacity of six long-range Tesla Model S cars combined.
Since early 2018 it has hauled limestone and marl at a quarry near Biel, feeding the Ciments Vigier cement works in the Bernese Jura. When it entered service it was billed as the largest battery-electric wheeled vehicle in the world.
How it charges itself
The secret is the shape of the job. The truck drives up a 13% grade to the top of the quarry while empty. There it’s loaded with rock, then it heads back down to the cement works more than twice as heavy.
On the way down, regenerative braking turns the electric motors into generators. Instead of wasting the truck’s momentum as heat in the brakes, it pushes that energy back into the battery. Because the downhill trip carries so much more weight than the uphill one, it recovers more energy than the climb used.
Formula E driver Lucas di Grassi tested this for CNN. He reached the top of the quarry with 80% charge and arrived back at the bottom with 88%.
The payoff
The eDumper does that run around 20 times a day. According to Kuhn Schweiz, the result is a surplus of about 200 kWh every day, or roughly 77 MWh a year, which can be fed back to the site.
A diesel truck doing the same work burns somewhere between 40,000 and 80,000 litres of fuel a year. Swapping it for the eDumper cuts up to an estimated 196 tonnes of CO₂ annually. That’s one truck, at one quarry.
The honest catch
Before anyone starts dreaming of a car that never needs charging: this isn’t perpetual motion, and it won’t come to your driveway. The energy isn’t free. It comes from gravity pulling 65 tonnes of rock downhill, and that only works because the quarry happens to sit above the factory.
Put the same truck on flat ground, or on a job where it hauls loads uphill, and it would need a charger like any other EV. Your car, which carries the same weight up and down, will always lose a little energy on the round trip.
It’s also worth noting the eDumper is a one-off rather than the start of a production line. So it’s best seen as a brilliant novelty: a perfect match of machine and terrain.
Why it still matters
Novelty or not, the eDumper proves something important: heavy industry can go electric, and some sites can do it with almost no charging infrastructure at all. Mines and quarries in hilly country, from the Alps to our own backyard, often move material downhill all day long. Every one of those is a candidate for the same trick.
It’s also a great reminder that the best green solutions often come from looking closely at a specific problem rather than chasing one fix for everything. Sometimes the cleanest energy source is the hill you’re already standing on.
Now if only someone could build a truck that turned cement into something greener. One giant green step at a time.
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