Scania develops biofuel-powered, driverless truck

Equipment and services company Scania announced that a multidisciplinary team is working on developing a cabless self-driving vehicle that would ease the workload at mines and large closed construction sites.

In a press release, Scania’s president and CEO, Henrik Henriksson, said that the AXL concept truck is steered and monitored by an intelligent control environment that sits on the front module, which replaces the traditional cab.

“In mines, for example, the autonomous operations are facilitated by a logistics system that tells the vehicle how it should perform,” Henriksson said. 

The executive also said that the combustion engine that powers the concept vehicle uses renewable biofuel. It’s “an example of how traditional and new technology is mixed,” he added.

Stockholm-based Scania decided to carve a mining niche into a new area, Scania Mining, back in 2012. The centenary company has said that its goal is to bring together products and solutions from other divisions and gear them strictly towards mining.