Picture a working mine in India, and the first thing you hear is diesel — giant dumpers growling up haul roads around the clock, burning fuel by the tanker-load. In Coimbatore, one company decided those giants should run on batteries instead, and it has quietly become one of the biggest names in electric mining trucks anywhere in the country.
Propel Industries, part of the AV Group, spent decades building its name in crushing, screening and washing equipment for mines and quarries, with more than 3,000 installations across over 50 countries and a catalogue of more than 135 equipment models. In 2023 it turned that mining know-how toward electric mobility, launching the 470 MEV and 470 HEV — 45- and 60-tonne electric dumpers built specifically for off-road mining.
At EXCON 2025 in Bengaluru, Propel unveiled its biggest electric line-up yet. The headline machine is the 90CED, which the company calls India’s first ultra-fast charging 90-tonne electric dumper, with a 34 cubic metre struck volume and battery options from 310 to 650 kWh. It is packed with safety systems built for mine work — ADAS Level 1 features, electronic braking, driver fatigue monitoring, fail-safe parking and full compliance with Directorate General of Mines Safety requirements. Alongside it came the 70CED, an 8×4 mining tipper with a 25 cubic metre rock body, the 560HEV-X construction tipper, and the upgraded 470MEV Gen-2.
The trucks are not showpieces — they are already earning their keep. The company says it has sold around 230 electric heavy trucks, which have clocked more than five lakh operating hours across coal, overburden, limestone, iron ore, stone quarry, marble and granite, and solid waste operations. Its first set of eight trucks has clocked 12,500 hours in two years, the equivalent of 20 hours a day. Because mine trucks run 20 to 22 hours a day, the company says switching to electric cuts operating costs by 20 to 30 percent — and a high-speed one-megawatt charger the company has introduced can push 300 kWh into a truck in 20 minutes.
Propel backs the hardware with its own digital layer. Pulse.ev, its in-house connectivity platform, gives fleet owners real-time vehicle health and diagnostics, energy consumption insights, predictive maintenance analytics and fleet optimisation for multi-shift operations. Pro EV Care wraps that in a service programme built around uptime, and the trucks carry an industry-leading battery warranty of five years or 5,000 cycles, with an in-built battery firewall that automatically detects and suppresses fires.
Propel is now scaling up for the next phase, with plans to invest ₹300 crore in its EV segment over the next three years and a dedicated EV plant near Coimbatore, and it has already extended its electric range beyond the mine with the 470 eTR electric tractor-trailer for road haulage. From crushing rock to hauling it on batteries, the Coimbatore company is showing that the heaviest work in India can also be the cleanest.
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