Electric, autonomous, and there’s 800 of them: inside this week’s BIGGEST deal

A Chinese heavy equipment maker, Tonly, has agreed to supply 800 self-driving electric mining trucks to a mining company in Xinjiang, in northwest China. The trucks run on swappable battery packs and are part of a broader push by mining operators to replace diesel haul trucks with electric, autonomous ones.

The truck involved, Tonly's DTE145, is a 90-ton hauler with a 770 kWh battery (with a larger 1,200 kWh option available) that can either plug in to charge or swap out a depleted battery pack for a fresh one in about seven minutes. That swap time is faster than refueling a comparable diesel truck, which is one reason mining companies are moving toward electric fleets: lower fuel costs, less maintenance, and now, quicker turnaround between shifts.

This news is about industrial mining equipment in China, not home energy upgrades, so it doesn't affect anything you'd do to your own house. But it's a sign of how fast large-scale electric and battery-swap technology is scaling up outside the passenger-car world, in machines that haul dirt and rock around the clock. The battery and fast-swap technology being proven here, made by CATL, a major battery supplier, is part of the same wave of advances that eventually filters down into batteries and charging systems used in homes and electric vehicles.