A Caterpillar 793F autonomous hauling truck deployed in Australia, via the company
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If anything, those videos should reinforce the sheer enormity of mining and oil sands operations. At the end of the day, the equation is pretty simple: Making more money means moving more material, which means bigger and bigger equipment. It's not cheap; large haulers run millions of dollars a piece, and maintenance is a massive undertaking. A heavy equipment mechanic who regularly posts on reddit offers a good glimpse into the scale of these things, as well as the cost—he recently mentioned that tires cost $108,000 to replace.At such scales, small efficiency gains netted from better-networked operations could have huge payoffs. And as strange as it might seem to have steel behemoths driving around without a driver, their routes through mines are pretty straightforward. While Suncor claims it's the first to use automated trucks in oil sands operations, they've become more and more popular in mining operations worldwide, so they must work. At the end of the day, it's just more evidence that if something can be automated, it will be.@derektmead