With Two 65-Liters Engines and 4,600 HP, This Is the World’s Biggest Truck

Be them precious or base metals, coking coal or iron sands, they are all compounds that were vital for our progress as a species. With use in almost every domain possible, mining has helped us in the construction of buildings, manufacturing of vehicles and fuel, and even computer electronics or food production.

Following the economic crisis in 2008, mining was faced with a downgraded level of profitability, and in need of new ideas for reducing costs. As the ‘digging’ part was pretty straight forward, engineers tried a variety of things to improve effectiveness whilst managing to keep the costs at a certain minimum. Realizing that a good part of the budget was spent on transportation, someone in Belarus decided to build a truck that had the greatest possible load capacity, so big that it sounded audacious.

That was the moment when the BelAZ 75710 was born.

The machine was monstruous right from the time it was put down on paper: the ultra-class haul truck measures 67,5 ft. long (20.6 m), 26,7 ft. high (8.16 m) and 32.3 ft. wide (9.8 m). And the wheels are gigantic too: the 8 super large Michelin tubeless pneumatic tires are each capable of withstanding loads of up to 100 tons (200,000 Lb).

Having these technical bits sorted out, the next important step was deciding on what approach to take with the overall design of the truck, as it was not intended to be a show vehicle, but a fully operating production machine that was supposed to be relatively easy to fix and to produce.

Engineers decided to use a system with two articulation points (both axles steering), because if they’d use just one, it would have required a larger hinge that would have been a disaster to work on, and basically if broken, the truck could not be repaired or would not be worth the effort.

Created with a capacity to carry 450 tons (900,000 Lb) and released in 2014, every characteristic of this beast screamed in flashing lights that it’s a super-giant, and it must be treated accordingly.

In order to move mountains of mining product, the truck was fitted with a dual-motor MMT 500 drive system, meaning two 65-litre (4,000 cubic inch) MTU 16-cylinder, four stroke V-shaped diesel engines (that was even hard to write, let alone grasp).

The output of each engine, which use an AC-powered electromechanical transmission developed by Siemens, is about 2,300 hp (4,600 total hp in its maximum mapping). The maximum speed that you can reach in this monster is nearly 40 mph (64 kph),  and if that is not impressive, the truck can still travel at 25 mph (40km/h) while climbing a 10 percent gradient hill.

That’s not where the cool stats end though. The BelAZ 75710 has a capacity of 5,600 liters of fuel (1,480 gallons), 538 liters of engine oil (142 gal) and a massive 1,800 liters of hydraulic fluid (475 gal). Safe to say that it’s a pretty thirsty beast.

To save fuel, an ingenious method has been developed in order to extract the maximum efficiency, alternating the engines to create a uniform wear when there was little or no load, with the option to engage both engines at the touch of a button.

The total mass of the BelAZ is rounded up to a crazy 810 tons (1,785,744 Lb), making it the largest haul truck on the planet and the flagship in the world of pit fleets, having a special place in the Guinness Book of Records for the biggest production haul truck ever made.

Despite the fact that the truck has enormous maintenance and production costs, the BelAZ 75710’s record does not stand only in the loading capacity corner, but somehow it manages to also be the world’s cheapest way to transport one ton of rocks. So I guess you could say that Belarus engineers knew what they were doing.