These truck designs are merely visions, they have no outstanding benefits or advantages over current truck designs, that are actually working in mines - and I believe they will stay dreams and visions for a long time to come.
This is a classic example of a person keeping himself comfortable in a CEO's position for years, on shareholders or public money, without producing a single example of a working prototype or actually making a sale of any kind.
The design of the EFT truck is exceptionally complex, it's a high maintenance item, with an excessive amount of features that have no real application or measureable benefit.
There are no cost-benefit studies produced by the designer to back up his claims, and no real "nuts & bolts" dissection of the vital working parts, that have to endure severe service conditions.
This design, or proposed design poses no real threat to the current state-of-the-art electric drive dump trucks.
Caterpillar have already experimented with 100 different designs, back in the late 1950's/early 1960's, and they didn't reach the design of current trucks, and the volume of current sales, by picking the wrong design.
The only mistake that Cat have made is by sticking with mechanical drive in the bigger trucks for too long. Mechanical drive is far outclassed by electric drive in the larger sizes, because of weight savings and sheer efficiency.
Cat were obliged to stick with this drivetrain design, once they went down that path - but they have long known that electric drive was superior in the larger sizes, and sought to rectify that by buying an electric truck manufacturer.
The fiasco of the failed Terex takeover in the early 2000's was a wrench in Cats wheelspokes that they didn't need - but the takeover of Bucyrus has seen them back on track, to where they originally wanted to be, 10 or 12 years ago.
That track sees Cat (or one of its subsidiaries) producing electric dump trucks in the larger sizes as their major direction, with mechanical drive being the forte of the smaller range.
