Skip to Content
Smart cities

Volvo is going to use autonomous trucks to haul stone out of a mine in Norway

November 26, 2018

Autonomous trucks made by Volvo will soon be hauling stone out of a Norwegian limestone mine, the car firm has announced.

What it’ll deliver: Six autonomous trucks will transport limestone the five-kilometer (three-mile) route through tunnels between a mine owned by local firm Brønnøy Kalk AS and a processing facility at a nearby port. Brønnøy Kalk is buying a service rather than the trucks themselves, so Volvo will oversee the technology throughout and be paid per ton delivered.

Testing, testing: The service is currently being tested and is expected to be fully up and running by the end of 2019. During the tests a safety driver will sit behind the wheel, but the trucks will be completely autonomous when they’re officially launched. They will be managed from the outside by an operator.

Gradual progress: This isn’t the first driverless-truck operation. Rio Tinto’s gigantic autonomous trucks currently haul metal ore at the firm’s mines in western Australia. Volvo has also been involved in autonomous-truck projects involving mining, sugarcane harvesting, and refuse collection. We’re likely to see driverless trucks on the road long before driverless cars, partly because they tend to drive more on open roads than in cities, which involve more complex variables. Trucking also benefits more from the sheer economic logic of deploying technology that doesn’t need to rest or take breaks, unlike humans. 

Keep Reading

Most Popular

The inside story of how ChatGPT was built from the people who made it

Exclusive conversations that take us behind the scenes of a cultural phenomenon.

How Rust went from a side project to the world’s most-loved programming language

For decades, coders wrote critical systems in C and C++. Now they turn to Rust.

Design thinking was supposed to fix the world. Where did it go wrong?

An approach that promised to democratize design may have done the opposite.

Sam Altman invested $180 million into a company trying to delay death

Can anti-aging breakthroughs add 10 healthy years to the human life span? The CEO of OpenAI is paying to find out.

Stay connected

Illustration by Rose Wong

Get the latest updates from
MIT Technology Review

Discover special offers, top stories, upcoming events, and more.

Thank you for submitting your email!

Explore more newsletters

It looks like something went wrong.

We’re having trouble saving your preferences. Try refreshing this page and updating them one more time. If you continue to get this message, reach out to us at customer-service@technologyreview.com with a list of newsletters you’d like to receive.