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蓝驰创投·May 18, 2022·0·0

Breaking Foreign Tech Monopoly, China Enters the 200-Ton Electric Mining Truck Era

Recently, giant intelligent mining haul truck developer Yimo Intelligent announced that it has raised tens of millions of RMB in an angel round led by BlueRun Ventures, with Vertex China participating. The proceeds will be used primarily for R&D and production of its 200-ton-class mining haul truck, operational testing, and building out its R&D and manufacturing teams.

Jui Chan, Managing Partner of lead investor BlueRun Ventures, said: "As the new energy sector expands, there are massive opportunities for vehicle electrification across mobility scenarios — and construction machinery represents one of the largest markets. Yimo has deep experience in ground-up design for both mining and electric vehicles. It has achieved electrification and intelligence for wide-body mining trucks, and on that foundation is building out a comprehensive green mining solution that improves operational efficiency and reduces carbon emissions. We have strong conviction in the Yimo team and believe they will become a leading brand in the new energy construction machinery industry."

Founded in July 2021, Yimo Intelligent is a technology company integrating R&D, design, production, and sales of new energy construction machinery with mining logistics services. Its founding team hails from the Automotive Engineering Department of Tsinghua University. The company's main products are giant intelligent mining haul trucks and electric construction machinery for specific closed-work environments. Starting from mining scenarios, it plans to expand into ports, steel mills, large-scale water conservancy and hydropower projects, and highway engineering — a trillion-RMB total addressable market — with the goal of becoming a global leader in new energy construction machinery manufacturing and operations services.

The scaling up of mining equipment is an inevitable choice for improving mining economic returns, and a basic consensus across the construction machinery industry. Meanwhile, under China's "carbon peak and carbon neutrality" goals, successive government policies on green mining and energy conservation have made electrification and intelligence of mining equipment a long-term strategic priority.

Data shows that China's annual in-mine short-haul transportation services market approaches 300 billion RMB. The previous workhorse was the 40-ton highway truck, which in recent years has been rapidly displaced by wide-body mining trucks. In the domestic market, for example, over 20,000 wide-body mining trucks were sold in 2021 — mostly 60/70-ton-class diesel models, with very low penetration of pure-electric variants. Only a handful of companies had produced prototypes exceeding 100 tons of payload, or they relied directly on imported models from Caterpillar, Terex, and others at prices dozens of times higher than domestic equivalents.

The core barrier to breaking through on large-scale equipment was that chassis scaling was constrained by imported components, with key technologies held by foreign suppliers. Existing domestic wide-body mining trucks generally used 6x4 chassis based on diesel drivetrains, without matched heavy-duty systems integrating engine, transmission, and drive axle. Pure-electric versions were mostly converted from diesel platforms with identical chassis, still unable to overcome the bottleneck of the "three powertrain components."

Yimo Intelligent founder Huakun Zhang said that with the rise of China's motor, battery, and electrification technologies, the team's more than ten years of accumulated expertise in relevant fields has created a first-line opportunity to break foreign technology monopolies. By adopting large-scale distributed electric drive chassis development technology, multi-module electrical and control algorithm architecture, and a ground-up self-developed electric system, Yimo Intelligent has developed an entirely new chassis system using multiple drive axles — breaking free from traditional chassis layouts, overcoming powertrain limitations, and eliminating dependence on imported components. Its first-generation model achieves a rated payload of 140 tons, bringing large-scale mining trucks into affordable mass application and opening a new era of 200-ton electric mining trucks in China. Based on a shared platform design with modular energy packs, the vehicles can accommodate range-extender hybrid, lithium-ion battery, or hydrogen fuel cell configurations, allowing them to adapt to different mining conditions while maximizing economic returns and energy efficiency.

Beyond scaling and electrification, Yimo Intelligent has also made early moves in intelligence. Looking at industry trends, demand for autonomous driving in mining vehicles is growing rapidly. To address this, Yimo Intelligent has built its own drive-by-wire chassis technology to capture and record vehicle state data during operation, with cloud-based storage and processing to determine optimal fleet efficiency patterns within mines. Based on deep R&D and precise understanding of vehicle data and control algorithms, and through integrated hardware-software design, Yimo Intelligent may hold significant advantages in matching perception, localization, decision-making, and control with large datasets.

Going forward, for ultra-large-scale mines, Yimo Intelligent will also introduce models exceeding 300 tons. It will offer complete intelligent mining solutions encompassing full hardware suites, dispatch platforms, standardized energy systems, and service and maintenance depots — addressing over 95% of mining operations.

Yimo Intelligent founder Huakun Zhang said that under China's commitment to peak carbon emissions by 2030 and achieve carbon neutrality by 2060, the new energy construction machinery industry will have enormous room for growth with very broad market prospects. Yimo Intelligent is fully committed to seizing this once-in-a-lifetime historical opportunity, breaking the "chokepoint" situation where development and manufacturing of large-scale wide-body mining trucks has relied on foreign key components, and creating greater economic and social value through a business model combining product sales, logistics services, and systematic solutions.

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