Retrofitted Haul Trucks Run a First Driverless Night Shift

In the week of 13 August 2026, EACON completed the first autonomous night shift at the Havana Pit in Western Australia, extending an operation that had reached day-shift autonomy in June. The fleet is six Komatsu HD1500 rigid haul trucks retrofitted with the company's autonomous haulage system, running without safety drivers in an active production environment. The project is a tripartite arrangement between EACON, contractor Thiess and Norton Gold Fields, part of Zijin Mining Group.

The company reports more than 3,100 unmanned mining vehicles deployed, over 40 mines operational worldwide and more than 100 million kilometres of accumulated safe autonomous operation.

The detail that matters technically is that the trucks were drawn from the existing fleet and converted by drive-by-wire retrofit rather than purchased new. That is an OEM-agnostic brownfield path to autonomy, and it moves the integration burden from the machine manufacturer to whoever does the conversion: steering, braking and throttle actuation on a machine that was not designed for it, positioning good enough to trust, edge compute that survives the vibration and dust of a haul road, and a site network that holds up across the whole pit.

Moving from day-only to round-the-clock operation is a larger step than it sounds. Night removes the visual cross-check that a supervisor in a light vehicle provides during the day, changes the thermal environment for both the machines and the electronics, and puts the system into the hours when the fewest people are on site to respond to anything unexpected. A fleet that is safe under supervision in daylight is not automatically safe unsupervised at three in the morning, and the fact that this was reported as a distinct milestone rather than a continuation reflects that.

For integrators the readable signal is that brownfield conversion is now a credible route, which means the addressable market is the installed fleet rather than only new equipment purchases.