Ultra-class vs standard-class haul trucks: telling them apart from overhead imagery

If you're trying to size a competitor's fleet from satellite passes instead of a site visit, the first wall you hit is payload class. A truck is a truck from 500 miles up until you know what you're looking at, and the difference between a 190-ton MT-series and a 360-ton ultra-class rig changes your whole production estimate for that pit.

Here's what actually separates them when all you have is an overhead RGB frame.

Length, tray footprint, and the ratio trick

Standard-class trucks (100 to 240-ton, think 785, 789, 930E) run somewhere around 12 to 13 meters nose to tray. Ultra-class trucks (290-ton and up, the 797, 980E, T 282, Belaz 75710 class) stretch past 14.5 meters and carry a visibly wider tray relative to the cab. At 0.5 m GSD that length difference is resolvable, but it's easy to misjudge a single truck in isolation because you have no scale reference in the frame.

You calibrate this by comparison. Pull a known reference object from the same pit, usually an excavator or a dozer parked nearby, and measure the truck against it. A standard-class truck's tray width runs close to a large hydraulic excavator's house width. An ultra-class tray overhangs it noticeably on both sides. Once you've calibrated against one or two known machines at a given pit, the ratio holds across the rest of the roster in that same image.

Tray shape helps too. Standard-class trays tend toward a straight-sided rectangular profile. Ultra-class trays flare wider at the rear to clear the dual or triple rear axle assembly, and that flare shows up as a trapezoid rather than a rectangle when you're looking straight down.

Shadow length and haul road geometry as secondary checks

Payload class correlates with deck height, and deck height casts a shadow. On a monthly pass at a consistent time of day, a line of trucks queued at a crusher or loading point will show shadow lengths clustered into two bands if the fleet is mixed class. The standard-class trucks throw a shorter shadow than the ultra-class units parked three spots down, even though both are sitting on the same bench. This works as a cross-check rather than a primary signal, since sun angle shifts month to month and you need same-pass comparisons to trust it.

Ramp and switchback geometry is the other tell, and it's often more reliable than the truck measurements themselves. Ultra-class trucks need a wider turning radius, and pits running a 290-ton-plus fleet build their switchbacks and loading aprons accordingly. If you see a haul road with tight, narrow switchbacks and cramped parking aprons at the crusher, that pit is very unlikely to be running ultra-class iron regardless of what any single truck in the frame looks like. Road geometry is baked into the pit design and doesn't change month to month the way a truck's position does, so it's a good sanity check against your per-truck reads.

None of this is instant. A credible payload-class call usually takes calibrating against a reference machine, checking the tray shape, and cross-referencing against the ramp width, pit by pit, because haul truck payload class from above is never a single clean signal. It's three weak signals that agree or don't.

That's the exact grind Mine Fleet OEM Share is built to carry month over month. It counts trucks, excavators, and dozers by manufacturer type at every active pit on a monthly pass and tracks how the mix shifts, so you get a pit-by-pit fleet roster instead of redoing the truck-by-truck measurement work from scratch every cycle.

If sizing ultra-class versus standard-class fleets pit by pit is eating your week, see what a standing monthly roster looks like for your target operator.