Swedish mining company LKAB is putting a pair of massive, 130-ton electric Scania haul trucks to work at its Malmberget iron ore mine – which happens to be more than 4,000 feet below the surface of the Earth.

Close to a mile beneath the historic Swedish mining town of Malmberget, a quiet revolution is taking place in the form of not one but two 150,000-plus lb. payload haul trucks with the ability move more than 3,200 tons of iron ore over the course of a full day’s running.

The trucks themselves are hugely capable 6×4 ultra heavy-duty prime movers packing 624 kWh li-ion batteries that promise seven hours or fully loaded run time per charge under ideal circumstances. And, it turns out, 4,000 feet underground is pretty close to ideal for this sort of thing.

“The environment is dark, but it’s ideal for electric vehicles,” explains Pär Sundqvist, an engineer within Electrification at LKAB. “We have good roads and a constant temperature of around 12 to 15 degrees Celsius, which is perfect for batteries.”

Charging is happens at speeds up to 375 kW on a CCS connector, with a full shift worth of electrons taking about 80 minutes to pump in, according to Scania.

Interestingly, the underground trucks deployed by LKAB don’t use the sort of the e-axle arrangement you might expect to see on “softer,” road-biased electric semi trucks from Mercedes-Benz or Tesla . Instead, the Scania heavy vocational BEV architecture uses a central electric machine + automated gearbox + conventional driven axles, which gear down for even more torque than the road-going Scania R45’s 450 kW (~610 hp) and 3,500 Nm (~2,580 lb-ft) of torque .

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