Full Self Hauling: Volvo moves 3 million tonnes of Earth, autonomously

The deployed fleet of ultra heavy-duty trucks and mining equipment assets powered by Volvo Autonomous Solutions reached a major milestone last week, hauling their 3 millionth tonne of material out of the mines without a human driver.

Volvo CE deployed its first pilot-ready autonomous hauling solutions with customers Boliden Garpenberg in Sweden and Brønnøy Kalk in Norway back 2023, with a milestone of 1 moving million tonnes (~1.1 US tons) of Earth autonomously by 2025.

Sharp readers will note that it is now 2026, and Volvo has blown past the original pilot’s goal, crossing the three million ton mark at Boliden’s Garpenberg mine earlier this summer. Volvo Autonomous Solutions (VAS) announced the achievement last week with a press release and a bunch of great new equipment photos – and Volvo executives, to their credit, seem super-hyped about the progress being made there.

“Reaching three million tonnes hauled autonomously is an important milestone that demonstrates the maturity of our autonomous transport solution and the value it delivers in customer operations,” offers Ingo Stürmer, VAS’ CTO. “This achievement reflects years of close collaboration between the Volvo Autonomous Solutions team and our customers to develop, deploy, and scale autonomous hauling in real-world environments.”

Be seen doing good work

Volvo calls its autonomous product line, “Autona / earth,” and is marketing it as a, “complete solution for autonomous hauling, factory-assembled,” by bundling the trucks, software, physical on-site infrastructure, and operational support into a single service in a bid to make autonomous hauling solutions easier for mines and quarries to deploy without the need to become autonomy experts themselves.

Electrek’s Take

Projects like this, and the autonomous Huawei-automated coal mine in Mongolia we covered back in March, are part of a larger shift taking place across the global mining sector. While passenger EV adoption dominates the headlines, the strongest economic arguments for electrification are often in industrial and logistical applications where vehicles follow fixed routes, consume enormous amounts of energy, and operate around the clock.

In those environments, every gallon of diesel displaced translates directly into measurable savings – more than enough savings, in many cases, to justify either a massive self-driving tech spend or a few hundred dollars’ worth of top-shelf LEGO sets to put in your office. You can check those out, below, then let us know what you think of Volvo’s mining milestone in the comments.

YOU MIGHT ALSO LIKE:

• LEGO Technic 6×6 Volvo Articulated Hauler
• LEGO Technic Volvo FMX Truck & EC230 Electric Excavator
• LEGO Technic Volvo L120 Electric Wheel Loader (currently 20% off)

SOURCE | IMAGES: Volvo Autonomous Solutions.

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