A three-tonne light vehicle cannot feel what a five-hundred-tonne haul truck feels. For years, that gap has been the blind spot at the centre of mining’s biggest hidden cost: the haul road.
Most mines still assess road condition the old way. A complaint comes in over the radio. A grader operator gets sent out to “find some stuff.” Drone surveys help, but they capture the road twice a day at best, and the surface degrades again within hours under constant heavy traffic. None of these methods see the road the way the haul truck fleet actually experiences it.
Turning every truck into a survey instrument
We built Decoda Detect to close that gap. Our truck-mounted sensors turn every haul truck into a live survey instrument, scanning the road at half-metre intervals rather than relying on infrequent snapshots. The result is a continuous, high-resolution picture of surface condition, tyre impact and bund compliance across the entire haul circuit, feeding directly back into how a site plans and dispatches maintenance.
The cost of getting this wrong is significant. Most haul truck tyres fail at just 40 to 60 per cent of their expected life, and rough surfaces can cost a single truck up to $10,000 in lost productivity across a single shift. Multiply that across a haul fleet running around the clock, and the haul road stops looking like a maintenance line item and starts looking like a production problem.
From detection to a closed loop
Detection alone was never going to be enough. Site teams are already stretched thin, so we distilled the data down to a single red or green alert an operator can act on in a moment, and built a closed loop that can trigger a geo-fenced work order for a grader operator the instant a hazard is confirmed. In trial deployments, that approach delivered a 60 per cent reduction in tyre-rock impacts and full operator adoption, because the system removed a decision rather than adding another dashboard to check.
This is also where the mining industry is heading. Autonomous trucks stop or slow when they encounter road conditions they cannot confidently read, and battery-electric fleets bleed range on rough surfaces through added rolling resistance. A precise, continuously monitored haul road is no longer a nice-to-have. It is the sensory layer that autonomous and electric fleets need to operate at all.
Industry recognised, thanks to our team and partners
We are proud to share that this work has been recognised with Silver in the Transportation Technology: T03. Technical Innovation of the Year category at the Stevie Awards for Technology Excellence, one of the world’s most respected business awards programs. The judges recognised Decoda Detect for solving a problem the industry has lived with for decades and largely accepted as unsolvable.
This result belongs to our whole team, whose focus on the operator experience turned a genuinely hard technical problem into something that can be actioned in a single glance. Thank you also to our global partners Kal Tire and TecWise, who have helped bring this technology to mine sites across multiple countries, and to the mining operations who backed a new approach over a familiar habit.
Time is money in mining, and for too long the haul road has quietly taken both. We built Decoda Detect to change that equation, and this recognition tells us we are solving the right problem, the right way. If your operation is still relying on a bump test or a twice-daily snapshot, we would love to show you what continuous haul road monitoring can do for your site.
