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    EACON autonomy on 120 BEV trucks at Zhundong mine: design notes for planners

    March 27, 2026|

    Reviewed by Tom Sullivan

    EACON autonomy on 120 BEV trucks at Zhundong mine: design notes for planners

    First reported on International Mining – News

    30 Second Briefing

    EACON’s ORCASTRA® autonomous haulage system has been deployed on 120 Tonly TLE138 battery-electric wide body trucks, each with a 90 t payload, at the Zhundong Open-Pit Coal Mine in northwest China, forming one of the largest single-site battery-electric haulage fleets globally. The fleet-scale autonomy on BEVs targets lower diesel-related ventilation demand and reduced haul unit operating costs on the mine’s large waste and coal benches. For mine planners and geotechnical teams, consistent autonomous haul patterns on wide body trucks will influence ramp geometry, dump stability, and traffic management design.

    Technical Brief

    • Fleet operates in a large open-pit coal environment, with long waste and coal bench hauls.
    • EACON’s system coordinates multi-vehicle haulage, loading and dumping sequences under centralised control.
    • Autonomous control includes truck speed, following distance and queuing logic on ramps and at dumps.
    • System relies on high-precision positioning and perception to maintain consistent haul paths on wide benches.
    • Battery-electric platform allows tighter control of regenerative braking behaviour on long downhill hauls.
    • Reduced diesel presence in pit directly affects ventilation design envelopes and fume dispersion assumptions.
    • Similar large-scale autonomous BEV fleets will force rethinking of haul road width, gradient and intersection design.

    Our Take

    Across our recent coverage, EACON’s autonomous battery-electric fleets at Shuichang and Taihe iron ore mines have been framed around unit haulage cost and emissions reductions, suggesting the 120-truck deployment at the Zhundong Open-Pit Coal Mine is likely being used to prove that the same economics work at very large coal operations in northwest China.

    The 90 t-class Tonly trucks at Zhundong sit in a similar payload range to the Komatsu HD1500 platform EACON is retrofitting in Australia, indicating EACON is standardising its autonomy stack around a common ultra-class segment that can be ported between Chinese coal, iron ore and international gold projects.

    Coal appears far less frequently than iron ore and gold in our autonomy- and sustainability-tagged mining pieces, so this large-scale battery-electric deployment in China signals that decarbonisation pilots are no longer confined to higher-profile metallic commodities.

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    Prepared by collating external sources, AI-assisted tools, and Geomechanics.io’s proprietary mining database, then reviewed for technical accuracy & edited by our geotechnical team.

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