Biggest Vehicles Ever Made

It’s human nature to constantly test the limits of what we can build. But engineers seem to double down on that instinct when it comes to vehicles. With no task too big and no job too much, humans have created some of the most unimaginable vehicles to undertake huge operations. Proving that sometimes bigger really is better, let’s take a look at some of the biggest vehicles ever made.

Nasa Crawler-Transporters

Getting a rocket from the ground into space is no easy feat, but did you ever wonder how it gets to the launch site in the first place? NASA tends to take the ‘slow and steady wins the Space Race’ route with a pair of 130-ft-wide behemoth machines called Crawler-Transporters. For over 55 years these gigantic machines have been responsible for moving rockets and spacecraft from the Kennedy Space Center Assembly Building to the launch pads!

Each transporter weighs almost as much as 100 Sherman tanks, clocking in at 3,150 tons and 3,300 tons each. Thanks to their enormous weight, they only travel at a speed of roughly 1 mph, with a top unloaded speed of 2 mph. So, even if you’re intimidated by their size, you could probably outwalk both crawlers with ease.

But what they lack in speed they make up for in loading capacity, with each of them able to carry 8,000 tons; that’s more than 25 fully-loaded Boeing 777 airplanes! They moved their first rocket way back in 1966, and the last time they were truly put to use was in 2011 moving the space launch system’s mobile launcher. But you might see them again in 2025 when NASA’s Artemis space project is due to take off! That’ll be one slow step for man, one giant crawl for mankind!

Space Shuttle Era: Crawler Transporter by NASA's Kennedy Space Center

Liebherr T284 Mining Truck

Mining operations are some of the biggest undertakings in the world, and for the biggest projects you definitely need the biggest trucks. This absolute beast is the Liebherr T248 Mining Truck. With an overall width of almost 32 feet, and a height of over 27 feet, that makes this truck about as tall as a two-story building! Also known as Haul Trucks, vehicles of this design are used to move huge amounts of earth or other material from one place to another, all in one go.

But what’s really fascinating about this particular truck is that it has one of the lowest empty vehicle weights for its gargantuan proportions. That means it weighs in around a paltry 240 tons. However, "paltry" only in comparison to the standard payload it can carry, which can reach 360 tons!

MSC Gülsün

The MSC Gülsün, one of the largest container transporting ships in the world, can carry more than 23,000 containers on its incredibly large deck. Measuring in at 203 feet wide and 1,312 feet long, it hits the seas chock-full of standard 8 feet wide shipping containers and transports them in rows of 24 across. If the same task of this scale was to be completed on land, it would require approximately forty-four 8,000-foot-long trains!

In one single voyage, the MSC Gülsün can transport weight roughly equivalent to 47,512 cars, or 2.94 million washing machines. Or, if you prefer your comparisons to be a little fruitier, approximately 223 million bananas!

However, you wouldn’t want to transport anything requiring a super-speedy delivery this way, because the huge operational tonnage of the ship means it only has a top speed of 21 knots, which is about 24 mph.

World’s Largest Willys Jeep

If the saying "bigger is better" has any truth to it, then classic American cars are no exception to the rule. But we won't be discussing the nearly 20 ft-long classic cars like the 1979 Lincoln Continental, or 1973 Chrysler Imperial LeBaron. This article investigates only the bigger picture. Specifically, the picture below!

That's the world’s largest working Willys Jeep replica, owned by Sheikh Hamad Bin Hamdan Al Nahyan. It’s approximately four times bigger than a standard Willys Jeep, and with a person for scale you can see just how large that really is!

Even though it looks statuesque, it is actually reportedly motorized and holds the Guinness World Record for largest motorized model car in the world! The Sheikh’s Instagram shows that he’s a very big fan of very big motors. And for this member of the United Arab Emirates royal family, when it comes to his cars, money really is no object.

He’s refused to reveal how much the construction of the 21-foot replica Jeep cost, but internet sleuths claim that those giant Earthmover tires are worth around $40,000 each, at least! While it stands as one of the greatest tributes to Jeep design ever created, it's probably not very practical to drive!

Mil-Mi-26 Helicopter

Trust the biggest country in the world to bring the biggest helicopter to the skies. While the rest of the world were building the biggest land vehicles, Russia created the 26-ft-high, 110-ft-long Mil-Mi-26 Helicopter, putting all other choppers to shame!

The maximum take-off weight of this 8-bladed-beast is around 56 tons; enough to carry 10 fully-grown African Elephants. Granted, that may not seem like a lot compared to other giant machines. But compared to the American AH-64 Apache Helicopter, which has a maximum take-off weight of 23,000 lbs, there’s almost 100,000lbs of difference!

With a flight range of nearly 500 miles, the Mil-Mi-26 is usually called in to help deliver large payloads to hard-to-reach places. Its day-to-day work usually sees it transporting planes and other smaller helicopters, like a Chinook back in 2002.

YouTube Video by Unknown

But it can also be used for more unusual purposes. For instance, it once helped haul a 23,000-year-old frozen woolly mammoth out of the Siberian tundra!

Hitachi EX8000-6

There are some jobs that are always going to require a little more power than one man and a shovel. And for those jobs, the pros call in the Hitachi EX8000-6.

This humongous mining excavator, seen here working at a coal mining plant in Mozambique, measures in at over 70ft long when fully-extended. That giant shovel is designed to carry over 170,000 lbs of material, which is like trying to lift the Endeavor Space Shuttle!

Hitachi EX8000-6 Excavator - Moçambique by Macpeças

Now this vehicle may be capable of lifting humungous amounts of weight, but it definitely wasn’t built for speed. With the track-based travel device able to top out at just 1.2 mph, you certainly can’t use this thing for a drag race.

But instead of favoring speed, the machine's lower rollers and track shoes have been designed to keep its giant body stable, which on its own weighs around 800 tons! That’s about the same as 4 statues of liberty!

Overburden Conveyor Bridge F60

Looking at the Overburden Conveyor Bridge F60, you might be mistaken for thinking someone tipped the Eiffel tower on its side! But with a length of 1,647 feet, the F60 is actually longer than the Eiffel tower is high.

It’s been out of commission for almost 30 years, but what exactly did this gigantic steel colossus do? It was a piece of mining equipment designed to remove the layer of dirt and rock lying above the seam of coal in a strip mine. With its cutting edge set 60 meters above the ground, giving it the name F60, it stood taller than an 18-storey building!

In its heyday, the conveyor belts you can see here carried dirt across the bridge to the opposite end, where it was transferred into dump trucks. It was able to convey over 1 million cubic meters of dirt per hour, weighing around 55,000 tons, that’s enough to fill up a soccer field to a height of 26 feet!

But this steel behemoth didn’t stay still while it did this. The structure rested on a two wheeled chassis that could ride stretches of very narrow-gauge rail, slowly moving the entire structure along the seam. They were strong enough to carry the 13,600-ton structure as well as all that dirt!

ETF MT 240

The Slovenian company ETF are known for making some of the largest pieces of mining equipment in the world, and the MT 240 is no exception. While it’s currently still in development, when it hits the market this gigantic mining haul truck will reach over 24 ft in height, 22 ft in width and 70 ft in length! That’ll make it longer than the Belaz 75710, the biggest mining haul truck in the world.

ETF MT-240 run 2 by ETF Vale

Because while the new MT 240 boasts an impressive payload of 218 tons, the Belaz 75710 can carry a staggering 496 tons! However, the MT 240 has a few tricks up its mechanical sleeves that may put it ahead of the competition.

First, its dump cycle will involve a swiveled hoist system so the truck can dump its load off 90 degrees to the side, making it easy to unload on tight roads. And second, its 10 massive wheel groups will work on 5 different axel lines, giving it greater off-road capabilities.

TI Class Supertanker

Over the decades, most of the biggest ships in the world have been mammoth sized oil tankers, but the largest of them still in operation are the TI Class supertankers. This class of seriously big tankers consists of four mega machines named TI Africa, TI Asia, TI Oceania, and TI Europe!

Tankers | Big & Active Ships - TI Class Supertankers by Vesseljoin

Built around 2002 and 2003, they each have a gross tonnage of 234,006 tons, allowing them to haul almost 111 million gallons of crude oil. To make that even dirtier than it already sounds, that’d be the same as watching oil gush over Niagara Falls for about 2 and a half minutes.

With all that oil sloshing about beneath the deck, these enormous tankers don’t exactly hurry to arrive at their destinations. As such, their top speed when fully laden is just 16.5 knots, which would be like traveling at 19 miles per hour in a land speed vehicle.

That means shipping routes like this one, which someone in a car could easily travel in just under 3 hours, takes these giant ships around 28 hours to complete! Very slow and very steady as she goes.

Höegh Target

Here’s a question: how do new cars from all over the world get transported overseas? Say hello to one giant answer in the form of the Höegh Target. It’s pretty distinctive thanks to its blunted bulkhead design, making it look more like a Tesla Cybertruck than a ship!

But despite its appearance, this is the largest pure car and truck carrier in the world! Measuring in at over 650 feet long and 120 feet wide, the 14-deck vessel has a maximum deck space of almost 770,000 square feet. That means you could fit two standard soccer pitches end to end on each of the loadable decks.

But just how much can this floating cargo hold carry? It boasts being able to transport up to 8,500 cars in one voyage! So, if each of these cars had an average length of about 14.7 feet, the line of them loading into this enormous ocean vessel would be almost 24 miles long!

BHP Billiton

Looking like a regular freight train to most people, the BHP Billiton iron ore trains that traverse the Australian deserts are legendarily long. Just look at the sheer length of one of them in the clip below, they look like massive metal snakes winding their way across the landscape! And this isn’t even their final form.

BHP Billiton Iron Ore Train by Vic Tilling

In 2001, BHP achieved new heights, or more accurately, new lengths, when they broke the world record for longest and heaviest freight train. Running between Yandi mine and Port Hedland in Western Australia, the 682-carriage train reached a final length of 4.5 miles long!

This required 8 diesel locomotives to convey over 90,000 wet tons of iron ore. In total, the gross tonnage of the entire convoy weighed almost 110,000 tons, which is about the same amount as 488 statues of liberty!

Saturn V Rocket

In all the history of human spaceflight, there’s no rocket quite as majestic as NASA’s gargantuan Saturn 5. Standing at a huge 363 feet tall, it’s taller than an American football field is long.

And even though it was used to launch American astronauts to the moon in the 1960’s and 1970’s, this granddaddy of spaceflight is still the most powerful rocket ever built! It could launch massive payloads of 50 tons to the moon, or 130 tons into Earth’s orbit.

Not to mention it weighed 3,100 tons when fully fueled at lift-off! That’s a hell of a lot of weight to fling up into the atmosphere, so it’s a good thing that it generated 7.6 million lbs of thrust at launch. According to NASA, for that amount of fuel you could drive a car that gets 30 miles to the gallon around the world 800 times!

The American Dream

Say hello to the undisputed daddy of all stretched limousines! This is the hilariously named American Dream, and reaching an incredible 100ft long you can certainly see why.

It was created back in the 1980’s when one wild car customizer, Jay Ohrberg, set out to pursue his dream of creating the world’s longest car. It was initially based on a 1970s Cadillac Eldorado like this one, but after extensive modifications the car was barely recognizable, save for the front grille!

By the time it was finished, this limo had 26 wheels, a hinge in the middle and two driver cabins. But it wouldn’t be the real American dream without a jacuzzi, one of which was installed at the rear, along with a helipad!

With all these ostentatious trimmings, this car was valued at around $2 million back in the 1980’s. But tragically, this American dream wasn’t long for reality. Being almost impossible to use unless it was going in a straight line, as well as getting a paltry 1 mile to the gallon, the limo didn’t see much action.

And by 2013, it had been left to rot in a car lot. Seems like this American dream turned into a real nightmare.

Worlds longest limousine by Matt Forty

Russian Zubr

They say that everything is bigger in America, but whoever said that clearly hasn’t seen this gigantic Russian hovercraft!

The Russian Zubr is a 187-foot long, 350-ton landing vessel that holds the Guinness world record for world’s largest hovercraft. This air cushioned behemoth is used by the Russian Military to move troops and equipment across land and water. It can even venture across unprepared coastlines!

While this makes them huge and deadly amphibious assault vehicles, just how much can these inflatable leviathans carry without sinking? When put to the test, their maximum displacement weight of 555 tons can transport up to three main battle tanks, ten armored vehicles or 140 fully equipped army personnel each!

The Largest Hovercraft In The World Firing Guns And Making An Amphibious Landing by SovietRussianBear ZOV

That may not seem like much, but by way of comparison the U.S. equivalent Landing Craft Air Cushion has less than half that maximum displacement weight at just 195 tons. That means it can only support 1 main battle tank or 4 light armored vehicles!

Antonov 225 Mriya

Is it a bird? Is it a plane? Well, yes, it’s a plane. But not like any plane you’ve laid your eyes on before. This is the Antonov AN-225 Mriya, the heaviest and largest single-fuselage airplane in the world.

This strategic airlift cargo aircraft was designed in the Ukraine, back when it was still under Soviet control in the 1980’s. Its initial purpose was similar to that of the NASA crawlers; to transport the Soviet spacecraft Buran to its launching pad in Kazakhstan.

To support these colossal payloads during landing and take-off, the AN-225 was designed with 32 wheels across its landing gear, also giving its giant body additional maneuverability and support.

With a colossal 288-foot wingspan, the wings of this plane are as long as four 18-wheelers set end-to-end! And they’re not just for show; each wing holds three giant turbofan engines where most commercial airplane wings only hold one!

With the extra power behind it, the AN-225 can fly with a maximum payload of over half a million pounds. That means this front and rear-loading sky-mammoth can be used to transport almost anything! From huge locomotives like trams, to the heaviest single piece of cargo ever transported via air, a generator for an Armenian power-plant, weighing 189 tons.

YouTube Video by Unknown

Incredibly, the latter big lift wasn’t even max capacity for the plane, but nothing big enough’s come along to really put it to the test yet! It seems Ukraine has laid undisputed claim to the title of heavy sky-high lifters, producing both the largest helicopter and the heaviest plane in the world!

Airlander 10

There’s one real stand out feature about the Airlander 10, and no, it’s not that it’s rear looks like a gigantic bubble butt.

From nose to tip, this blimp-like aircraft measures in at a huge 302 feet long, with plans announced in 2020 to extend that even further to 320 feet in length! That’ll make it at least 45 feet lengthier than the previously mentioned Antonov-225 Mriya, which hits just 275 feet long.

The helium-filled hull, clever aerodynamics, and vectored thrust of the Airlander’s engines make air travel in this sky beluga much more efficient than traditional planes. That’s because most of the airframes weight, which tops the scales at just 44,100 lbs, is countered by the helium’s natural buoyancy.

So, assuming it was carrying it’s maximum payload of 10 tons, it would produce approximately 75% fewer emissions than competitor aircraft in similar roles. But this green-tech initiative hasn’t always been an easy ride, mainly from ill-fated test flights like this one in 2016.

Airlander 10 crash (close-up & slow motion) by SciNews

Komatsu L-2350

The phrase titans of industry is rarely used in a literal sense, but when you take a look at the L-2350 it’s clear you’re in the presence of a very real giant! This front-end wheel loader has an operating payload of 160,000 pounds, which means it can lift material weighing almost as much as a Boeing 727!

Komatsu wheel loader L-2350 by Kikki's Workshop YouTube Official Channel

These kinds of earth movers are four-wheel drives, designed for strength, durability, and maneuverability around a construction site. With its bucket fully raised, the L-2350 reaches a grand height of 43 foot 11 inches. Which means if you ever need to lift your personal jet onto the roof of your four-story home, you can!

But one of the main features you might first notice about this incredibly sized vehicle are the tires. Anyone who owns a car knows tires aren’t exactly cheap, and just one of these 157-inch diameter tires can set you back around $100,000. And that’s without the chain grip surrounding this particular one in the post below! Although, unlike a regular car tire, standard potholes probably aren't going to be a problem for this absolute unit.

4100 AC Mining Shovel

There’s more than one way to dig a hole, and with the variety of massive excavators on the market, there are many different technologies that take digging to incredible heights! Or technically, depths. Like P&H Mining’s 4100 AC Mining Shovel.

P&H Mining Equipment 4100 AC Mining Shovel Walkthrough by P&H Mining Equipment

These types of machines use a series of steel ropes and winches controlled by electric engines to power their digging efforts, unlike more traditional hydraulic systems. But they can definitely keep up, working with an average payload of 180,000 pounds per scoop!

That huge payload is thanks to that colossal bucket, which has the capacity to hold over 1,700 cubic feet of material. So, in theory, it would take only 50 scoops from this behemoth’s bucket to fill an entire Olympic pool. Although dropping it from its maximum dumping height of 31 feet might cause a bit of a splash, so make sure you look out below!

Bucket Wheel Excavators

Certified as the largest and heaviest series of land vehicles in the world, the humungous vehicle in the video below is a Bucket Wheel Excavator! Despite the menacing, chainsaw looking wheel, the only these machines cuts through is the earth.

Biggest excavator in the world!! Bucketwheel excavator 291 moves mountains by Baggerfritz

Bucket wheel excavators of this size usually make up part of a continuous mining system. As the wheel at the front of the machine turns, large buckets attached to it scoop up earth before dropping it onto a conveyor belt.

The ThyssenKrupp Bagger 288 you can see in the image below has a wheel made up of 18 buckets, each one with a capacity of 233 cubic feet. That’s enough to fill 44 bathtubs with earth for very scoop! With the wheel continually in motion, the Bagger 288 has the capacity to shift almost 8.5 million cubic feet, or roughly 380,000 tons, of earth every single day!

The 288’s big brother, the Bagger 293, transports the same amount but with a little extra junk in the trunk. This 315ft-tall, 738ft-long excavator holds the Guinness world record title for both the largest and heaviest land vehicle. It requires 16.5megawatts of power to run, which is about enough power to put 8 million smartphones on charge.

At a staggering 14,196 tons in weight, the 293 can only achieve a top speed of 0.3mph. And yet, thanks to their ingeniously-designed weight distribution, these machines leave tracks no deeper than a human footprint! They may move slow and steady, but if you ever want to move a mountain, these metal titans are still the best way to do it.

I hope you were amazed at the biggest vehicles ever made! Thanks for reading.