Full Self Hauling: Volvo moves 3 million tonnes of Earth, autonomously — SkimNews
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- Volvo Autonomous Solutions reached 3 million tonnes hauled autonomously at Boliden's Garpenberg mine in Sweden, achieving the milestone earlier this summer and announcing it via press release last week.
- VAS first deployed pilot-ready autonomous hauling solutions with Boliden Garpenberg in Sweden and Brønnøy Kalk in Norway in 2023, with an original goal of 1 million tonnes by 2025 — a target it has now tripled in 2026.
- Volvo markets the operation as its 'Autona / earth' product line, a factory-assembled bundle of trucks, software, on-site physical infrastructure, and operational support aimed at letting mines deploy autonomy without becoming autonomy experts.
- Ingo Stürmer, VAS' CTO, framed the milestone as proof of the solution's maturity and the value delivered in real customer operations after years of close collaboration.
- Electrek situates the achievement within a broader shift across global mining toward autonomous, electrified fleets — citing the Huawei-automated coal mine in Mongolia as a parallel example and arguing industrial and logistics electrification often carries a stronger economic case than passenger EVs.
Why it matters: Volvo tripled its original 2025 pilot goal inside one mine in roughly three years, demonstrating that autonomous heavy-haul transport is graduating from pilot to scaled customer operations. The bundled service model directly targets the adoption barrier of mines lacking in-house autonomy expertise, materially lowering the threshold for other operators to follow.
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