Electric Vehicles

Published on November 17th, 2014
by Zachary Shahan

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Originally posted on CleanTechnica

The largest truck in the world is a monster. It’s crazy big and weighs a modest 360 tons when empty, or up to 800 tons. The GVW BelAZ 75710 is a mining truck and it, of course, uses the power of an electric motor… or four of them.

Somehow, over the years, electric cars got the reputation of being small, weak, puny. It may have even started back in the early 20th century, when electric cars were popular, but especially with women. Women liked them because they were cleaner and didn’t require a ton of muscle work to get them started. However, because women preferred them, many men decided they shouldn’t. More recently, thanks to golf carts with small batteries and a dozen or so electric car models that weren’t much more than golf carts, the stigma about electric cars got even worse.

Of course, Tesla Motors came along and showed us that electric motors are awesomely powerful and can be used to create cars much better than gasmobiles in basically every respect. Let’s also not forget that trains and trams, beasts of machines in their own right, are often electric.

The GVW BelAZ 75710 uses four Siemens electric traction motors. Each of them has an output of 1,200 kilowatts (~1,800 hp). “The electricity is provided by two generators, each of which is driven by a 16-cylinder diesel engine with an output of approximately 1,700 kW,” Green Car Congress notes. “The first BelAZ 75710 model recently began operating at a Siberian mine in the Kuzbass region of Russia. The truck is more than 20 meters long, almost ten meters wide, and eight meters high. It weighs 360 tons when empty and can transport around 450 tonnes of cargo, a volume that corresponds to a fully loaded Airbus A380 airplane.”

This massive truck isn’t just the biggest truck in the world, but it’s actually able to carry 25% more load than the the truck that was previously the biggest truck in the world. “Unlike previous models, the new truck was to be outfitted with eight tires, because each tire is designed to carry a load of only about 100 tons. An extensively tried and tested drive system was used as the basis of the new truck’s drive system, and the engineers also developed a new type of control system. All of the components of the electric drive system came from Siemens.”

Next time someone tells you how weak or small electric vehicles are, aside from directing them to Tesla, also let them know about this beast of a truck.

Let’s just hope the mining it’s doing is for renewable energy technologies!