I can guarantee you it won't be sitting. I was using the example of one thing it can do when I was talking about stripping topsoil. If it was deep coil, it would have very little use, but for shallow cover on the sides of a road widening job like this company does a lot of, it would be great to use instead of a cat, which is what they do now. Do you figure it would be better to windrow topsoil that is 4 inches deep and make one pass through with buggies to get it, or run the buggies all over the area and pick it up at a much slower rate?
What they have been using it for is maintaining haul roads for the buggies and trucks. Mostly, this consists of the grade for the road they are building, so the GPS info is there for the machine to work to. You should see it go! It's running at about 3 to 4 times the speed of a grader, and therefore is replacing about 3 machines with one, that right there is a huge cost savings. Not to mention not having to pay going rate for a blade hand.
It's great at leveling the fill as the buggies are dumping, way faster than a cat, or a packer with a blade, and the scrapers don't have to slow down and spend time maintaining their fill area. Speeds up production there quite a bit. It can even make trips through the cut and knock down the rough spots so the cats don't have to , and the buggies can literally fly in, grab a quick load and are gone....speeds up production there too.
There are tons of things it's capable of, but I don't really feel like sitting here and typing for as long as it takes to explain it all since you likely won't listen anyhow.
It's a support machine. It's not going to make money on it's own, but with the number of machines it can replace and the way it helps production, it more than pays for itself around the job. Keep in mind, this thing isn't on hourly jobs. This company bids large jobs, and then does them fast, very fast. It's not like it has a set price they have to charge it out for, but it lets them get more out of their other iron and that's where they make their money.