If you follow self-driving cars, you know this week’s scoreboard. Waymo flipped Las Vegas to fully driverless and named Denver, San Diego and Tampa as the next three, running about 3,500 robotaxis and more than 20 million trips to date, according to Electrek. Tesla’s rival service, launched in Austin in June 2025, is still down to roughly 20 driverless cars covering about 245 square miles, per third-party tracking. Waymo has been at this since 2009, and the argument is still about four-way stops. Meanwhile, there are more driverless haul trucks moving rock around the planet right now than there are Waymos on American streets. They weigh 320 tons each and nobody argues about them. On April 21, Komatsu announced it had commissioned its 1,000th autonomous ultra-class haul truck, the first manufacturer to reach that number. The truck that got it there is a 930E-5AT, an electric-drive machine rated at 320 US tons, or 290 metric tons, in one load. It went to work at Barrick’s Nevada Gold Mines, the surface operation Barrick runs as a joint venture with Newmont. A mine is an easier problem than a city, and that is the whole point A robotaxi has to deal with jaywalkers, a van double parked in the bike lane, cones that moved overnight, and a cyclist treating a red light as a suggestion. A haul truck deals with none of it. The road is private, the route is a fixed loop from shovel to crusher, and every other vehicle on that road belongs to the mine and answers to the same dispatch system. The truck is a 2,700-horsepower diesel-electric machine, and the hardest thing it meets on a shift is a pickup driven by someone who was trained on a simulator before being allowed near it. The connectivity matters more