Volvo's Autonomous Trucks Cross 3 Million Tonnes Hauled

Volvo Autonomous Solutions has hauled more than 3 million tonnes of rock and ore without a driver at the wheel, the company said Sept. 24, 2026. Its quarry site in Norway alone had already passed 1 million tonnes in 2025.

The 3-million-tonne total spans two customer sites in Scandinavia, according to Volvo's announcement: Brønnøy Kalk, a limestone quarry in Norway, and Boliden's Garpenberg mine in Sweden. Ingo Stürmer, chief technology officer of Volvo Autonomous Solutions, said the milestone "demonstrates the maturity of our autonomous transport solution and the value it delivers in customer operations."

Nine trucks run a 5-kilometer route through Norwegian tunnels

At Brønnøy Kalk, nine autonomous trucks haul material from the quarry to a crusher along a 5-kilometer route that runs through tunnels with steep inclines, according to Volvo. The site began autonomous hauling in 2023 and had crossed 1 million tonnes on its own by 2025, Electrek reported, a year before the combined total across both sites reached 3 million. The trucks run on Volvo's Autona/earth service, which bundles autonomy-enabled haulers with the Volvo Virtual Driver software, site infrastructure and fleet management rather than selling the hardware on its own.

1. 2025 (Brønnøy Kalk only)1 million tonnes
2. Sept. 2026 (both sites)3 million tonnes

Source: AB Volvo press release, Sept. 24, 2026, accessed 2026-09-28

Boliden's Garpenberg mine adds hauling for a dam reinforcement project

At Garpenberg, Volvo's autonomous haulers move material from a quarry to what the company calls a dynamic unloading area, supporting dam reinforcement work at the mine, according to Electrek. The equipment includes articulated haulers, wheel loaders and excavators fitted with drill arms, built at Volvo Group's plant in Säffle, Sweden.

Why fixed routes are where mining autonomy pays off first

Electrek's coverage tied the economics behind Autona/earth to sites that run fixed routes around the clock, pointing to a Huawei-automated coal mine in Inner Mongolia running 100 autonomous electric haul trucks as of March 2026 and to Fortescue's own figure, which The Terminal could not independently verify, of saving more than $400 million a year in fuel costs by switching to electric haul trucks. Volvo has not published a comparable savings estimate for Brønnøy Kalk or Garpenberg.

Volvo describes Autona/earth as built for what it calls confined areas rather than public roads, a distinction that separates a fixed quarry loop from a robotaxi fleet navigating open city streets. The trucks at Brønnøy Kalk cover the same 5-kilometer stretch on every run, which is what lets Volvo tune the Virtual Driver software to one route instead of an unpredictable city grid.

Volvo has not said when it expects a third site to join the two named in Thursday's announcement, or what tonnage threshold would prompt its next update. It also has not disclosed how many jobs the autonomous fleet has displaced at either site, a number that would let a reader weigh the tonnage milestone against its cost to the workforce running the quarry before Volvo's trucks arrived. Volvo Construction Equipment, the division that builds the haulers themselves, has not said whether the Säffle plant is adding capacity to keep pace with orders from mining customers beyond the two sites named in the Sept. 24 announcement. CNH tied its own farm-equipment autonomy push to a 290-point drop in operating margin rather than a hauling total, and Waymo's robotaxi expansion has run into grid capacity rather than a software limit, the same kind of infrastructure constraint that will decide how fast a site like Garpenberg can add trucks of its own.

Sources

1. Three million tonnes hauled autonomously by Volvo — AB Volvo
2. Full Self Hauling: Volvo moves 3 million tonnes of Earth, autonomously — Electrek