From electrification to autonomous driving, two technological revolutions in China's mines

Bill Gates never came to China to mine

But one thing he did say:

"People always overestimate what will happen in the next year or two and underestimate what will happen in the next five to 10 years."

It is deeply predicted that China's mining equipment market, especially mining trucks.

Xidi Smart Drive mining card · Jurong, Jiangsu Province

The first change is the electrification of the car

The year 2017

Very Chinese characteristics of the off-highway wide-body dump truck (hereinafter referred to as the wide-body truck), the fuel version is selling well, because it is compared with the road dump truck to strengthen the body, compared to the rigid car is very cheap, so that it has become the mainstream in the domestic open-pit mine market, a large number of replaced the road dump truck and even replace the large tonnage rigid car, in the coal mine, gravel mine, cement mine is very popular. Annual sales exceeded 10,000 units.

Diesel fuel card

It was also in this year that the first pure electric widebody car came out, but almost no one paid attention to it, because pure electricity sounds very good, but in the eyes of those who do engineering, the impression is: three trips on the knees, at least double the cost, and the battery is wasted for a year.

Almost all owners, hearing pure electricity, have no interest in continuing to listen to the sales manager.

The year 2021

Gates predicted that after 5 years, the sales volume of 90 ton pure electric wide-body vehicles is about 600 units (no industry data, the author's own statistics), which Yutong, Sany, Xugong, Lingong, Tongli and other companies as the main force. Five years, a hundredfold increase.

2022

According to the market feedback of the manufacturers in the first quarter of this year, in 2022, China's pure electric widebody vehicle sales will break the 2,000 mark. Major Oems are also gearing up, and according to industry sources, the entire industry's planned production capacity for electric vehicles is close to 5,000 units.

The electric widebody you used to love, now you can't afford it.

There are many reasons why electric wide-body vehicles can turn over, mainly in:

Battery, motor and electronic control supporting technology is mature, stable performance and cost reduction, especially the large-scale application of lithium iron phosphate batteries with standardized modules.

In heavy duty downhill scenarios such as cement and sand mines, the heavy duty downhill energy recovery effect of pure trams has obvious advantages. In the case of suitable slope, it can save more than 90% of the operating costs, and even in suitable conditions, it can continue to run for one month without charging.

Energy recovery

The introduction of national policies such as new energy, energy conservation, emission reduction, and low carbon has given pure trams policy support in some regions.

Although the one-time procurement cost has increased, the advantages of electric vehicles have made more and more high-end customers, especially building materials mining customers, choose it.

Electric wide-body cars from change to change, really only 5 years.

Another change is autonomous driving

In 2017, two companies in Xuzhou have begun to conduct autonomous driving research and development, the situation at that time, the domestic autonomous driving industry has just started, are focused on urban taxis and other hot money areas. In the mining field, which has been forgotten by science and technology under the tide of mobile Internet, we simply do not know what automatic driving is, and finally have customers willing to try it under harsh conditions, but it is only the beginning of a long and arduous iterative debugging journey. For the programmers who work in high-end office buildings every day, the mine environment is really too bitter.

In 2017, only a handful of mines deployed mine truck scheduling systems. Mine management in the industry basically relies on walkie-talkies and tacit understanding. The mining industry is almost a wasteland of cutting-edge technology.

In 2017, an autonomous driving company called Xidi Intelligent Drive was quietly established in Changsha.

Effect of Xidi intelligent driving Industrial Park

In 2022, automatic driving is already the most interesting topic for mine operators, and China has more than 300 automatic driving mining cards in testing. From sensors, lidar, positioning systems, communication systems, drive-by-wire actuators, to investment circles, financial circles, as well as national policy formulation and industry associations at all levels, everyone unanimously recognizes that automatic driving in mines is a very clear and unique industry segment, and there are related dedicated products, investments and policies. Domestic medium and large state-owned mines and first-line private mines are all laying out unmanned vehicles, and even investing research and development forces like Conch Cement in independent research and development.

The domestic autonomous driving companies can be described as white flowers, from scientific research institutions to universities, from cross-industry to mining enterprises self-research and self-marketing. According to incomplete statistics, all the companies involved in mine automatic driving reached more than 50 by the end of 2021, including many automatic driving R&D teams of major mining card manufacturers.