Deep in a quarry, a 90-tonne dumper climbs out of the pit loaded with rock — and the only sound is the tyres on the haul road. No diesel roar, no exhaust haze. That is the scene Propel Industries is building across India’s mines with its 90CED, a battery-electric dumper the company unveiled at EXCON 2025 in Bengaluru — and the company calls it India’s first ultra-fast-charging 90-tonne electric dumper.
The headline number is the charging. The 90CED carries battery options from 310 to 650 kWh in a 34-cubic-metre body, and using megawatt charging, the company says its latest tippers can go from zero to 100% in about 20 minutes. In mining, that is the number that matters: a dumper earns its keep in hours worked, and every hour on charge is an hour not hauling. Fast charging turns the electric dumper from a green gesture into a machine that can keep pace with a diesel fleet, shift after shift.
The 90CED was the flagship of a four-truck launch at EXCON 2025. Alongside it came the 70CED — the company calls it India’s first 8×4 mining tipper, with a 25-cubic-metre rock body built for higher payload on every trip — plus the 560HEV-X and a new generation of the 470MEV, the model that started Propel’s electric journey in 2023. Around the trucks, Propel launched Pulse.ev, a connectivity platform built in-house for electric mining and hauling operations, and Pro EV Care, a service programme designed to keep the trucks running at high uptime.
The trucks are built for the hardest workplaces in the country, and the safety list reads like one: ADAS Level 1 assistance, electronic braking, driver fatigue monitoring, fail-safe parking and a trunnion jack, plus a lithium-ion battery pack with an in-built firewall and automatic fire detection and suppression — and the company backs the battery with a five-year or 5,000-cycle warranty. The machines meet the Directorate General of Mines Safety’s requirements.
The trucks are already earning their keep. Propel entered the electric truck market in 2023, and the company says it has sold around 230 electric heavy trucks so far. Together they have logged more than five lakh operating hours — the first eight trucks alone clocked 12,500 hours in two years, the equivalent of nearly 20 hours of work a day. The trucks are at work in coal, limestone and iron-ore mines, stone quarries, marble and granite sites and solid-waste operations — and seven of the company’s 470 HEV electric tippers are hauling coal in Chhattisgarh.
Propel Industries has been building machines for India’s mines since 2009. The Coimbatore company, part of the AV Group, started with crushing, screening and washing equipment and grew into India’s leader in that field — more than 3,000 installations across 50-plus countries, over 135 equipment models, and 3,500-plus mining and quarrying customers who taught it exactly how a machine earns its keep in a pit. In the last fiscal year the company reported revenue of &rupee;1,750 crore, with electric trucks contributing nearly &rupee;170 crore. “Every new platform we introduced today responds to the real needs of heavy-duty mining and construction environments,” says V. Senthilkumar, Propel’s managing director.
More Read
The company is putting serious money behind the shift: &rupee;300 crore committed to its electric-vehicle business over three years, on top of &rupee;300 crore more for crushing and screening. It has already invested &rupee;125 crore in its Coimbatore factory, which can build three electric trucks a day — with a new EV facility planned to lift output to six to nine trucks a day.
Here is the company’s own film from the launch:
India’s mines move mountains of rock every day, and for decades the machines that moved them ran on diesel. Propel’s bet is that the next mountain moves on batteries — charged in minutes and already hauling in mines across the country. Ninety tonnes at a time, the quietest revolution in Indian mining is already at work.
Keep reading: The Self-Driving Auto-Rickshaw: Inside Omega Seiki Mobility’s Swayamgati, India’s First Autonomous Electric Three-Wheeler · No Maps, No LiDAR, No Driver: Inside Swaayatt Robots, the Bhopal Startup Teaching Cars to Drive Themselves on India’s Roads · More Automotive & Mobility stories
Like stories like this? Add Exceptional Technology as a preferred source on Google to see more of our reporting in your search results and Discover feed.
