If you think you’ve seen the world’s largest land vehicle and it’s not the Transformers nor Caterpillar machines, think again.
Source: Dark Roasted Blend
Currently holding the world’s biggest land vehicle is the Bagger 288 excavator which is built by Krupp (now ThyssenKrupp) of Germany and now owned and operated by RWE AG, a large utility company. The bucket wheel excavator is intimidatingly humongous at 311 feet in height, 705 feet in length and 46,600 tons – in contrast, Titanic was 46,328 tons. It takes five people to operate it having a 70-foot diameter bucket wheel, with 20 buckets that can scoop earth material of over 530 cubic feet. In a day, the Bagger 288 can process 100,000 cubic yards of material equivalent to 2,500 truckloads.
The original function of this earth digger is to work in open-pit coal mines in Germany, which might be in halt with country mandating a shutdown of all German coal mining by 2018. Its design and manufacture took five years, not including the assembly which is another five years, totalling to a cost of $100 for its production.
Source: Twister Sifter
Being a huge vehicle has its downsides – it can only go one-third of a mile per hour on 3 rows of caterpillar track assembles. Moreover, every highway it crosses needs to be fully rebuilt because of its weight, basically destroying everything that is in its path. It needs tons of people for its mobility too, a good 70 men to prepare the way. Its preferred transferring was through caterpillar treads rather than disassemble-and-reassemble because it is less expensive.
The Bagger 288 replaced NASA’s Crawler-Transporter in the throne of the world’s largest land vehicle.
