The 795F is Caterpillar’s first foray into electric drive trucks for many years and fills the gap between open cut miner favourites the 793F and the 797F.

Both the 793 and 797 are mechanical drive trucks.

The 795F AC has a 345 short ton payload and is aimed at those miners that have a preference for electric drive trucks.

Under an agreement between the two companies, Immersive is provided with confidential Caterpillar machine technical information necessary to properly simulate Big Yellow’s machines.

Immersive product manager Karen Joseph said the project had been driven as part of its collaboration with Caterpillar that “focused on releasing training simulators alongside or shortly after Caterpillar’s release date for the model simulated”

Its developers worked with Caterpillar engineers to get the most accurate facsimile of the 795F AC.

The simulation uses the instrument panel and advisor display from the real truck, using hardware and software supplied by Caterpillar.

For some operations using Caterpillar’s mechanical drive trucks, adoption of the 795F AC will require some retraining of the drivers. Not only are they handling a different machine, they are using a completely different propulsion system.

Simulated machine behaviours experienced during the execution of safe operating procedures, such as starting on an incline and responding to machine monitoring system warnings, have been meticulously modelled and matched.

The correct operating procedures are tightly integrated with an extensive learning system within the PRO3.