Vale's Aggressive Autonomy Scale-Up Validates Mixed-Fleet Economics

By OpenAutonomy.com Editorial team

Vale just announced plans to nearly quintuple its autonomous truck fleet—from 32 to 150 units within two years. For a company that started autonomous operations at Brucutu back in 2018, that 32-truck figure might seem surprisingly modest. But the slow pace wasn't about hesitation or underwhelming results. Vale's fleet diversity was the constraint.

The Brazilian miner operates a complex reality at sites like Carajas: multiple truck models from Caterpillar, Komatsu, Liebherr, and others. Different size classes. Different generations of equipment. When autonomy meant committing to a single vendor's complete system, that heterogeneity created a brutal economic choice—retrofit everything to match, or leave perfectly functional equipment idle while autonomous trucks work around them.

Vale chose patience. And now, with the industry shift toward OEM-agnostic autonomous systems, that patience is paying off.

What Changed: Technical Interoperability, Economic Reality

During Vale Day 2025 in London, CEO Gustavo Pimenta addressed this directly when asked about scaling autonomous operations across the Northern System mines. The company is "buying a new autonomous fleet to deploy there," he explained, with Brucutu serving as the fully autonomous template they're working to replicate.

But here's the critical detail that Marcelo Bacci, Vale's Executive VP of Finance and Investor Relations, highlighted: "With the autonomous trucks there was an important change in the industry more recently, where the autonomous kits that you buy are interchangeable between the different brands—so you can buy the kit from one brand and install on the truck you have from another brand."

This is more than technical convenience. It’s capital preservation.

Vale can now deploy autonomy across its existing mixed fleets without the massive capital expenditure of standardizing on a single truck manufacturer. Bacci explicitly noted this "reduces a lot the CAPEX as you don't need to change the whole equipment—only make autonomous the truck that you had before."

Once that constraint disappeared, the economics changed fast. That’s how you go from 32 trucks to 150 in two years.

The OEM Strategic Shift

Vale's announcement aligns with comments Caterpillar made during its own Investor Day 2025. Without naming the customer, Caterpillar's Resource Industries President Denise Johnson described winning a major project at "two of the largest iron ore mine sites in South America" by offering autonomy that works across both Cat and competitor trucks.

This represents a significant strategic shift for truck OEMs. Third-party autonomy providers have offered OEM-agnostic retrofit solutions for years - it's their fundamental business model. What's new is a truck OEM adopting this approach. Caterpillar is essentially competing with its own truck sales by making its Command system available on competitor equipment.

According to Johnson, the customer was facing “productivity and utilisation challenges” and needed “technology that worked across mixed fleets.” Caterpillar’s answer was to deploy its autonomous system on more than 90 trucks—Cat and non-Cat alike—using a flexible, OPEX-focused commercial model and accelerated rollout timelines.

That description maps almost perfectly onto Vale's situation and announced expansion. And Johnson's closing observation matters: "Many sites around the world have mixed fleets and are looking to activate technology immediately."

Vale isn't an outlier. They're representative.

Beyond the Hype: Real Performance Numbers

Vale's push to scale isn't driven by buzzwords or industry pressure. The performance data from their existing autonomous operations at Brucutu and Carajas tells a straightforward story:

• 11% lower fuel consumption versus crewed trucks

• Operating speeds increased from 40 km/h to 60 km/h

• 11% higher hourly productivity

• 35% longer tyre life

These aren't marginal gains. They're material enough to justify capital deployment at scale—especially when that deployment no longer requires fleet standardization.

What This Validates (And What It Doesn't)

Vale's approach proves something important: you no longer need to standardize your truck fleet to deploy autonomy at scale. That's a significant technical and economic breakthrough that removes a major adoption barrier.

But it's worth being precise about what this represents. Vale is deploying Caterpillar's autonomous system across multiple truck brands. That’s OEM-agnostic autonomy. It solves the truck standardization problem, but it doesn't eliminate vendor lock-in. Vale is still operating within a single autonomy provider’s ecosystem.

The distinction matters:

• OEM-agnostic autonomy (what Vale is doing): One vendor's autonomous system works across multiple truck brands. You preserve your existing truck investments, but you're locked into that autonomy provider's ecosystem—their software stack, their fleet management layer, their upgrade path.

• Open autonomy (the alternative approach): Standardized interfaces that allow any autonomous system to work with any fleet management platform, with swappable components across the stack. You preserve flexibility at every layer, not just at the truck level.

What's notable here isn't that OEM-agnostic autonomy is now available—third-party providers have offered this for years. What's significant is that a major truck OEM has now adopted this approach, bringing established distribution channels, service networks, and operational relationships that make deployment faster and more familiar to mining companies.

Vale had options. Open autonomy solutions offering system-level interoperability already exist in mining operations. Vale chose the OEM path: same vendor lock-in as before, just without the truck replacement penalty. That choice reflects current market dynamics where established OEMs compete effectively through operational advantages despite offering identical system-level constraints.

The rapid expansion from 32 to 150 trucks demonstrates that solving the truck compatibility problem unlocks capital. It also demonstrates that when a major truck OEM offers OEM-agnostic autonomy, many operators will choose that path over open alternatives - even when open autonomy solutions are already deployed and proven in the field.