In May 2025, with some fanfare, 100 cabless and autonomous all electric mining trucks were put into operation by coal miner China Huaneng Group at the Yimin open-pit coal mine in Inner Mongolia, China.
The fleet was the result of a partnership between truck OEM XCMG along with network provider Huawei, and State Grid Smart Internet of Vehicles Co Ltd on the joint innovation project which uses a Huawei 5G-Advanced (5G-A) network and XCMG supplied battery swapping stations together with plug in charging. The network features 500 Mbps uplink and 20 ms latency.
Huawei Cloud provides the Commercial Vehicle Autonomous Driving Cloud Service (CVADCS) that uses a crowdsourced map for real-time operational location updates. This enables fast route optimisation, reduces waiting times, and improves operational efficiency, maximising the strengths of collaborative truck fleet operations.
XCMG has now given an update on the performance to date of the ZNK95 machines, sometimes referred to as the Huaneng Ruichi trucks. These include a record single day material movement from October 2 of over 100,000 cubic metres, with the trucks to date having completed 47,800 battery swaps – with cumulative electricity exchanges amounting to an energy consumption of 21.54 million kWh, which it estimates has saved 7,500 t of diesel fuel use and therefore 24,000 of CO2 emissions. Over 100 million cubic metres in total have been hauled.
It adds that the green and low-carbon advantages have been highlighted, and the green economic benefits have been made apparent, injecting a strong impetus into the further sustainable development of the mine.
XCMG added that the autonomous and zero emissions operation has become more mature and stable. Key functions such as more precise spotting for shovel loading, efficient two sided loading, real time sensor based upgrading of maps and flexible configuration of waste disposal areas have been fully realised to sustain stable production under complex work conditions.
The 90 t payload vehicles use a multi-modal neural sensing network and five-layer emergency braking system, which realises unmanned L4 operation at all times and up to 22 hours a day. The operational efficiency exceeds 120% that of equivalent manned trucks; with XCMG adding that the trucks at 90 t class are the world’s largest driverless electric mining trucks in operation, with the fastest operating speeds of 40 km/h and the lowest minimum operating temperature of -40°C.
