NASA announced its Crawler Transporter 2 is now officially in the Guinness World Records as the heaviest self-powered vehicle in the world. But there’s a whole universe of big beefy vehicles right here on Earth to explore. You’ll find them here.
NASA is certainly no slouch when it comes to huge, impressive forms of transportation — the Artemis rockets themselves could be considered candidates as the largest vehicles ever built — but instead we’re going to stick to Guinness’ handy definition of a self-powered vehicle meant to traverse the earth (though we do get slightly creative on that front). Get ready to read about some seriously huge mining equipment.
Caterpillar 797
This big boi sports a 4,000-horsepower engine capable of hauling 401 tons, according to CAT. Its top speed when fully loaded is a blistering 64 km per hour. Now that’s truly hauling arse.
Terex RH 340
This massive excavator actually works in tandem with big Cats like the 797 above. With a massive scooper capable of chewing through 44.5 cubic yard of material, it would take a mighty dump truck to handle those loads.
RWE Bagger 293
All of the Bagger vehicles are huge and meant for coal mining operations. These suckers are so big they often look like the bad guys in an anime from a distance. The 293 in particular is 96.01 m tall, and at 31 million pounds, it’s the heaviest self-propelled land vehicle on Earth.
America’s Deep Submergence Vessel NR-1
Hear me out: The Deep Submergence Vessel NR-1 is a nuclear submarine that, get this, has bottoming wheels that extend so that the sub can more easily travel along the sea floor. The sea floor is practically land, just with a bunch of water in the way. Whatever, I’m calling it technically a car. A nuclear-powered “research” (spy) sub. It may be the smallest submarine in the fleet, but at 145-ft long, it’s bigger than most wheeled vehicles. And weighing in at 366 long ton displacement, it’s bigger than everything else on this list. Just don’t get distracted by the fact it’s a submarine.
Scheuerle SPMT
This thing is a very cool. The self-propelled modular transporter is like a truck you can add axles to. Stacking these bad boys up can quickly turn into a massive vehicle, one capable of transporting incredibly heavy loads. Your vehicle size and load-carrying ability is limited only to your imagination (and how many SPMTs you have on hand).
BelAZ 75710
Another giant dump truck, this one hailing from Belarus. This behemoth is capable of moving 496 tons of material in one go, according to the BBC. The entire vehicle weighs 385 tons. Two 16-cylinder diesel engines send power to four electric motors which power to eight tubeless pneumatic tires. It works shuttling rocks around mines in Siberia.
Big Muskie
If you read that name and thought “Gee that sounds like something out of the midwest,” you are right! Big Muskie was a coal mining excavator in central Ohio. This chonk was 22 stories high and remains the largest single-bucket excavator ever built. As you can tell from the image above, that single bucket could move a lot of earth — 220-cubic yards! That’s about two Greyhound buses according to the blog Ohio Valley Abandoned.
Le Tourneau L-2350
This 6.46 m tall monster comes with a 2,300 horsepower turbocharged engine. It operates out of Perth, Australia and is one of the largest wheeled loaders in the world.
Crawler Transporter 2
This vehicle needs no introduction. Since 1965, Crawler Transporters 1 and 2 have been hauling NASA’s huge rockets out to launch pads. Crawler Transporter 2 was recently retrofitted in order to handle the new Artemis rockets. It now beats its sibling vehicle in weight at 6.65 million pounds and takes the World Record lead. It takes the Crawler Transporter 2 anywhere from eight to 12 hours to make the 6 km trip from the Vehicle Assembly Building to the launch pad.
Liebherr T 282 series
Powered by a 3,650-HP diesel-electric engine, the Liebherr T 282 series can hit speed of 55 km per hour and deliver a payload of 400 tons.
Komatsu D575A Super Dozer
This dozer certainly lives up to its name, the Komatsu Super Dozer reaches 4.88 m into the air and sports a 11.73 m blade. That scoop can handle 82.30 m of material at a time, and the whole truck weighs in at 167 tons.
LeTourneau TC-497 Land Train
Some crazy how, we’ve never written a post just about the LeTourneau TC-497 Land Train, and that is gonna change pronto. These vehicles were bonkers. Similar to the SPMT, the length of your land train was limited to your imagination and the number of engine cars you had on hand. The largest stretched 182.88 m long. It also featured a unique drivetrain — with electric motors powering each wheel. It’s basically a train with rubber wheels. The main cab came with a kitchen and sleeping births for four crew members. Developed for the U.S. Army, the land trains unfortunately never made it past a few prototypes.
F60 Overburden Conveyor Bridge
The company claims the F60 Overburden Convoy Bridge is known as the “Horizontal Eiffel Tower of Lusatia,” which sounds like a very complicated sexual position. It’s also much bleaker than the Eiffel Tower, considering it stretches across a coal mining site. Seriously, the instance of comparing this bleak monstrosity to the most iconic landmark in the world is hilarious:
With a total length of 502 metres, the F60 beats the Eiffel Tower, which is 182 metres shorter. The width of 204 metres and the height of almost 80 metres emphasise its gigantic dimensions.
Ya burnt, Paris! Even with some dismantling of the Bridge since it closed in the early 90s, the structure still weighs somewhere in the neighbourhood of 11,000 tons.
Herrenknecht EPB Shield S-300
Much like the NR-1, I’m putting the biggest boring machine ever built in here on a technicality. Just because it works underground doesn’t mean it’s not a land vehicle. Heck, it’s the most land vehicle out of all of these if you think about it. The Herrenknecht EPB Shield S-300 has a maximum cutting size of 14.94 m via two cutting wheels spinning in opposite directions, according to Unitacc.com. It weighs in at a staggering 4,810 tons.
ETF MT-240
This thing is so cool but seems as if it is still in development. This massive mining vehicle is fully electric and comes with a unique ability to turn each of the 10 wheels at the same time, essentially allowed it to turn on a dime, as Interesting Engineering put it. The truck is supposed to have fully swappable parts in order to cut down on time in the shop. It’s pretty nifty if they get it to work. Here’s an ETF Mining videos showing a three minute engine swap, for instance.