Actually, the NASA crawler-transporter is the world’s largest self-propelled land vehicle of any sort, but to get 11 million pounds rolling (for Apollo and then Shuttle), it needs 16 electric motors.
For a sense of scale, you can see one of the eight tractor treads here. It’s bigger than a school bus. Each of those cleats on the tread weighs a ton.
It has a menacing look in the shadows, in a forklift face-off.
The “EV” moniker is a safe assumption since the heavy stuff, from trains to tanks, have gone electric long ago (because you can get so much more torque from an electric motor and you don’t have to deal with a transmission). But it’s not a green machine. Like tanks and trains, it burns diesel to run the generators that power the electric motors. The liquid fuel is used for its energy density. And boy, do they use a lot of it. Instead of MPG, think 126 gallons per mile.
Kennedy Space Center has been using the same two crawlers, nicknamed “Hans” and “Franz” for the bodybuilding characters, since 1965. In their lifetime, they have crawled the same driving distance as Miami to Seattle.
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