The World's Largest Electric Vehicle Is a Dump Truck

Back before we as a society got privy to saving the environment, the scattering of Nissan Leaf owners were constantly pummeled with jokes. U.S. drivers, in particular, love that surge of adrenaline at the sound of a revved up combustion engine.

But this electric vehicle is much more badass because it's the world's largest EV—and it's a 110-ton dump truck.

The truck is used to haul lime and marlstone, which contains clay and silt, from the sides of mountains in Switzerland. Then, the material is transported directly to a cement factory. But here's the really impressive piece of engineering—this heavy dump truck never needs to be charged.

Here's how it works: The dump truck, itself, weighs 45 tons and ascends a hill at a 13 percent grade, in one scenario. On the way back down, it's more than twice as heavy, carrying 65 tons of ore. To rectify that scenario, the truck's "regenerative braking system" actually recaptures the energy created by going downhill, refilling the battery's charge for the next time the truck travels uphill.

The dump truck is officially called the Elektro Dumper, but the German manufacturer, Kuhn Schweitz, made life a lot easier by naming it eDumper for short. The eDumper was modeled on a Komatsu HB 605-7, a massive dump truck: It's 30 feet long, 14 feet wide, and 14 feet tall, plus the tires are six feet high and the dump bed reaches up to 28 feet when fully extended.

The stock dump truck was also painted green and Kuhn Schweitz added a 600 kilowatt-hour battery pack to the vehicle—that's enough to power six long-range Tesla Model S cars And those lithium batteries tack on another 900 pounds.

Kuhn Schweitz said that making the trip from quarry to cement factory 20 times in one day produces a surplus of 200 kilowatt-hours of energy (or 77 megawatt-hours per year). Your average dump truck, by contrast, uses between 11,000 and 22,000 gallons of diesel fuel each year.