This is the largest and heaviest land machinery recognized by the Guinness World Records.
In the Chinese movie “The Wandering Earth,” the prototype of the future excavator is as tall as 30 stories, with a total length close to 2.5 football fields and heavier than the Eiffel Tower, which is currently hosting the Olympics. It is the Bagger 293 bucket wheel excavator produced by the German company Krupp (later merged with Thyssen to become ThyssenKrupp). It is mainly used in large open-pit coal mines. The self-propelled excavator Bagger, with its massive size and unparalleled working capacity, has become one of the most famous large loading and unloading equipment on the street.
The Bagger 293 is 240 meters long, with a ground width of 49 meters and an overall height of 96 meters. The direct advantage of its huge size is its astonishing work efficiency. Even when facing dense hard rock or frozen soil, its actual production capacity can reach 240 km³ per day. How to understand this number? A common automatic dump truck has a capacity of 24 m³, which means that it is equivalent to the work of ten thousand two trucks per day. If it is excavation work, it can even achieve a daily work efficiency of 300 km³ per day.
Behind the high work efficiency lies the high cost of construction and operating expenses. The first product in the Bagger series, the Bagger 288, alone took 5 years for design, manufacturing, and assembly. Completed in 1978, it cost $100 million, which adjusted for today’s prices, could be over $1 billion. The Bagger 288 has a maximum walking speed of only 10 meters per minute. Despite this, its level of automation is quite high, requiring only 5 people for operation. It generally does not leave the mining site, but any movement, such as crossing a road, attracts crowds of onlookers.
When the Bagger 293 was introduced in 1995, its daily operating cost was $2 million, consuming fuel at a rate that would require dozens of gas stations for every hundred kilometers traveled.