{"id":13412,"date":"2026-07-12T06:30:47","date_gmt":"2026-07-12T10:30:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.autonocion.com\/us\/?p=13412"},"modified":"2026-07-12T05:28:50","modified_gmt":"2026-07-12T09:28:50","slug":"driverless-truck-komatsu-tons-rock","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.autonocion.com\/us\/driverless-truck-komatsu-tons-rock\/","title":{"rendered":"A 320-ton driverless truck with 2,700 horsepower just became the 1,000th of its kind to go to work, hauling gold ore through Nevada on a fleet that has moved 11.5 billion tons of rock \u2014 while Waymo and Tesla still argue about 3,500 robotaxis"},"content":{"rendered":"

If you follow self-driving cars, you know this week’s scoreboard. Waymo flipped Las Vegas to fully driverless and named Denver, San Diego and Tampa as the next three, running about 3,500 robotaxis and more than 20 million trips to date, according to Electrek<\/a>. Tesla’s rival service, launched in Austin in June 2025, is still down to roughly 20 driverless cars covering about 245 square miles, per third-party tracking. Waymo has been at this since 2009, and the argument is still about four-way stops.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, there are more driverless haul trucks moving rock around the planet right now than there are Waymos on American streets. They weigh 320 tons each and nobody argues about them.<\/p>\n

On April 21, Komatsu announced<\/a> it had commissioned its 1,000th autonomous ultra-class haul truck, the first manufacturer to reach that number. The truck that got it there is a 930E-5AT, an electric-drive machine rated at 320 US tons, or 290 metric tons, in one load. It went to work at Barrick’s Nevada Gold Mines, the surface operation Barrick runs as a joint venture with Newmont.<\/p>\n

A mine is an easier problem than a city, and that is the whole point<\/h2>\n

A robotaxi has to deal with jaywalkers, a van double parked in the bike lane, cones that moved overnight, and a cyclist treating a red light as a suggestion.<\/p>\n

A haul truck deals with none of it. The road is private, the route is a fixed loop from shovel to crusher, and every other vehicle on that road belongs to the mine and answers to the same dispatch system. The truck is a 2,700-horsepower diesel-electric machine, and the hardest thing it meets on a shift is a pickup driven by someone who was trained on a simulator before being allowed near it.<\/p>\n

The connectivity matters more than the sensors. At Cortez, Nevada Gold Mines built a private 5G network with Nokia and Sedna because the Wi-Fi it had been using could not keep up. NGM Director of Innovation and Technology Matthew Majors told Engineering & Mining Journal<\/a> that access points had been bolted on as needed, which worked fine for fleet management and not at all for automation.<\/p>\n

Komatsu launched FrontRunner in 2008. It had 875 autonomous trucks in service in May 2025 and 1,000 eleven months later. Those fleets have moved more than 11.5 billion metric tons of material. Komatsu says autonomous operation inside the design envelope averages a 40% improvement in tire and brake life and a 13% cut in overall maintenance.<\/p>\n

\n
\n
APRIL 21, 2026<\/div>\n
KOMATSU MILESTONE<\/div>\n
1,000<\/div>\n
Autonomous ultra-class haul trucks commissioned. Up from 875 in May 2025.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
\n
TRUCK NO. 1,000<\/div>\n
320 tons<\/div>\n
Rated payload of the 930E-5AT at Nevada Gold Mines. 290 metric tons, 2,700 hp.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
\n
SINCE 2008<\/div>\n
11.5 bn<\/div>\n
Metric tons of rock and ore moved by driverless Komatsu fleets worldwide.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
\n
GLOBAL FLEET<\/div>\n
~4,000<\/div>\n
Autonomous haul trucks in mines worldwide. More than half of them in China.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Ten trucks at Cortez, and a plan to automate every haul road NGM owns<\/h2>\n

The press release is the tidy version. E&MJ went to Cortez and counted trucks. As of mid-April, NGM had 10 hauling autonomously, with another 13 converted and waiting, and expects all 23 in production by the end of the summer. Phase 3 takes the system to the Carlin mine. The stated aspiration is every primary haul road NGM owns.<\/p>\n

None of it was quick. Barrick converted five Komatsu 930E-2 trucks at Goldstrike in 2018 and ran them in the Arturo pit for two years as a proof of concept. NGM later bought 62 new 930E-5 haul trucks and specified them as autonomous-ready, so the kits could bolt on later. It picked FrontRunner in late 2023 and began the real rollout at Cortez in 2025, with five trucks doing reclamation work in a fenced-off corner of the pit.<\/p>\n

The industry has a name for what happens next when this goes wrong. They call it the pit of despair: a mine nails the five-truck trial, scales up, and watches production sag because nobody trained the workforce for the full-size version. NGM has run more than 9,000 hours of automation training with over 100 employees to avoid it.<\/p>\n

Majors gave E&MJ two reasons. Safety first: shovels drop big rocks into big trucks, and the soft-tissue injuries that causes are not fixed by stretching programs. Then labor. Northeastern Nevada cannot staff the mines it already has, let alone the ones ramping up.<\/p>\n

Mark Hill, Barrick’s president and chief executive, said in Komatsu’s announcement that pulling operators off haulage means “autonomy supports safer, more skilled roles.” Which is corporate for: the driving job goes away. What has happened at Cortez so far is narrower than the press release or the cynicism. E&MJ reports no layoffs from the rollout, roles changing rather than vanishing, and shovel operators who like the arrangement because the loading rhythm is now theirs to set. Their verdict, relayed by Majors: “The trucks just keep coming.”<\/p>\n

Caterpillar is not sitting this one out<\/h2>\n

Cat runs its own system, Command for hauling. The company says more than 820 autonomous Cat trucks<\/a> are working worldwide, that they have hauled over 11 billion tonnes between them, and that they have done it with no reported injuries.<\/p>\n

The target is bigger than the fleet. At Caterpillar’s investor day in November, Resource Industries group president Denise Johnson said the company intends to triple the 690 autonomous trucks it counted at the end of 2024, which lands it past 2,000 by 2030<\/a>. She pointed at declining ore grades, rising input costs and labor as the drivers, and put autonomy’s growth rate at about 12% a year.<\/p>\n

A lot of that is supposed to come from smaller sites rather than giant open pits. Cat’s first quarry deployment, a fleet of 777s at Luck Stone’s Bull Run plant in Virginia, hauled its first million tons by July 2025 and passed two million inside its first year.<\/p>\n

China went straight to battery-electric, and skipped the cab<\/h2>\n

The Huaneng Yimin open-pit coal mine in Inner Mongolia is China’s second-largest, with capacity for 35 million metric tons a year. Since May 2025 it has run 100 driverless haul trucks built by XCMG that are also fully battery electric, coordinated over a Huawei 5G-Advanced network.<\/p>\n

Each truck carries 90 metric tons on a swappable 568 kWh lithium iron phosphate pack. Swaps take about five minutes, with a success rate above 98%, Electrek reported in March<\/a> after the fleet had logged thousands of hours. Huaneng claims the trucks hold records for payload, speed and cold, running continuously at minus 40 degrees Celsius, which is also minus 40 Fahrenheit.<\/p>\n

Huawei says the Yimin truck is the first mining truck in China built with no driver’s cab at all, on the logic that a truck with nowhere to sit keeps people out of the hazard zone entirely. Komatsu and Caterpillar are automating trucks that were designed around a driver. XCMG built one that never had a seat to remove.<\/p>\n

Roughly 4,000 autonomous haul trucks now work in mines worldwide, more than half of them in China, per Marketplace<\/a>. Electrification is running well behind automation, though. Even the Australian gold mine that ran 155 straight hours on solar, wind and one battery<\/a> still has a haul fleet burning diesel every shift.<\/p>\n

\n
\n
CORTEZ, NEVADA<\/div>\n
10 of 23<\/div>\n
Trucks hauling autonomously as of mid-April. The rest are converted, targeted for this summer.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
\n
YIMIN, INNER MONGOLIA<\/div>\n
\u221240\u00b0<\/div>\n
Continuous operating temperature. 100 battery-electric trucks, 90 metric tons each, no cab.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
\n
NASHWAUK, MINNESOTA<\/div>\n
400 tons<\/div>\n
Per load, on Mesabi Metallics’ Komatsu trucks. The tires alone stand 13 feet tall.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Minnesota bought the trucks before the mine opened<\/h2>\n

Last November, hundreds of people lined up outside the offices of Mesabi Metallics in Nashwauk, Minnesota, to look at a truck. It was a 400-ton Komatsu, the biggest ever brought onto the Iron Range, and Dan Kraker reported for Marketplace that people posing beside a single 13-foot tire were dwarfed by it. Most of the haul trucks working Minnesota’s other mines would fit inside its bed.<\/p>\n

The truck arrived in a $110 million batch of equipment. It can pull power from electric trolley lines strung along the haul roads, which cuts fuel and doubles its climbing speed out of the pit. And it is set up to run without a driver, which is not the same as running without one. Mesabi says it will form a committee to work out how to deploy the technology, and switch it on as soon as it can.<\/p>\n

So the mine bought driverless trucks before it produced an ounce of ore. When Marketplace visited, trucks were due to start work early this year and the mine was due to open fully by June. Mesabi Metallics now says production begins in the third quarter<\/a>, which would make it the first new taconite operation on the Range in about half a century.<\/p>\n

Sebnem D\u00fczg\u00fcn, a mining engineering professor at the Colorado School of Mines, told Marketplace that any mine designed from scratch today should be autonomous from day one, and that the worldwide record so far shows automation moving work around rather than deleting it. “It changes the nature of the job,” she said. Mines hire control-room operators and data analysts instead of drivers. The United Steelworkers, which represents the miners up there, is taking a wait-and-see position.<\/p>\n

The self-driving car money already moved<\/h2>\n

Watch where the Silicon Valley autonomy people went. Pronto, the off-road autonomy company founded by former Google and Uber engineer Anthony Levandowski, was acquired outright in April by Atoms, the physical-AI outfit Travis Kalanick has been building since he left Uber. Pronto became the core of a new division, Atoms Mining.<\/p>\n

Its first deal afterward was with Mariana Minerals, putting Pronto’s camera-based haulage system on trucks at Copper One, a copper mine and refinery in southeastern Utah. The system works on other manufacturers’ trucks, and Pronto says it had already hauled more than two million tons at a single commercial site. Levandowski told International Mining that autonomous haulage “is a scalable production tool available today”<\/a>, which is a pointed thing to say from a man who spent a decade chasing passenger cars.<\/p>\n

Two of Uber’s best-known alumni, reunited, and the product is a dump truck. Rio Tinto’s driverless ore trains<\/a> followed eleven years after the first driverless haul trucks, in 2019, for the same reason. Private right of way, and no strangers on it.<\/p>\n

The cab is the tell<\/h2>\n

Strip out the pedestrians, the cross traffic and the strangers, and autonomy stops being a research problem and becomes a purchase order. That option is not available to anyone building a robotaxi.<\/p>\n

Which is why the American trucks still have cabs. The brochure for the 930E-5, the same truck family as the one Komatsu just commissioned in Nevada, lists a four-post ROPS cab, a fully adjustable driving position and an AM\/FM\/CD\/MP3 radio, on a machine that spends its shift driving itself. The seat is there because the truck was drawn around a driver and automated afterward. Yimin’s truck has no cab, no seat and no radio, because nobody was ever going to sit in it.<\/p>\n

Tesla, meanwhile, still keeps remote operators who can take direct control of a stuck robotaxi<\/a> at low speed. The mine solved its version of this by owning the road and everything on it. Nobody has worked out how to buy Las Vegas.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

If you follow self-driving cars, you know this week’s scoreboard. Waymo flipped Las Vegas to fully driverless and named Denver, … <\/p>\n

Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":13416,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[121],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13412","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-industry","resize-featured-image"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.autonocion.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13412","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.autonocion.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.autonocion.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.autonocion.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.autonocion.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13412"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.autonocion.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13412\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13421,"href":"https:\/\/www.autonocion.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13412\/revisions\/13421"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.autonocion.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/13416"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.autonocion.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13412"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.autonocion.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13412"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.autonocion.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13412"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}