Why adding trucks is usually the wrong answer

Production is short of target, and the instinct in the room is almost always the same: add a truck. It feels like the obvious lever — more capacity, more tonnes. It's also, in a genuinely balanced fleet, one of the most expensive ways to solve the problem, because the bottleneck usually isn't truck capacity at all.

What the match factor is actually measuring

The match factor compares the loading capacity of your shovels to the hauling capacity of your trucks. When a fleet is well matched, a truck arrives at the shovel just as it finishes loading the previous one — no truck queueing, no shovel standing idle. Add a truck to an already-balanced fleet and the new truck doesn't add tonnes; it adds a longer line at the shovel. You've spent capital to create a queue.

The cost curve nobody looks at

Plotted against fleet size, operating cost per tonne isn't a straight line — it's a shallow U. Too few trucks, and shovels sit idle waiting for empties; too many, and trucks sit idle waiting to load. The lowest-cost point sits in a narrow band in between. Past that point, every additional truck adds fuel burn, maintenance load, and operator cost while the queueing time eats most of the production gain. Most fleets that "need another truck" are actually sitting to the right of that curve already.

What to fix before you buy

Three things usually move production more than another unit does, and cost less:

Route and assignment logic. The same operations-research principles behind shortest-path routing and dynamic assignment (the tools that decide which truck goes to which shovel, in real time, based on current conditions) routinely recover production from an existing fleet that a static, manual assignment leaves on the table.

Queueing at the shovel, not just on the road. A few minutes of avoidable queueing per cycle, multiplied across every truck and every shift, is often equivalent to the output of an entire additional unit — without the capital cost.

Loading and hauling balance, measured, not assumed. Most fleets were sized against a plan, not against how the operation actually runs today. Re-checking the real match factor, after ore-body or route changes, frequently reveals the fleet was never as far out of balance as the shortfall suggested.

When adding a truck is actually right

Sometimes it is the answer — after route optimization, queueing reduction, and a re-checked match factor confirm the fleet is genuinely undersized for the plan, not just under-optimized for its current one. The point isn't that more trucks are never the answer. It's that they're the answer you should reach for last, not first.