This study examines the maintenance records for components necessary for the comfort and safety of the operators of heavy mobile equipment. The results show that air conditioners, ladders, driver’s seats and mirrors and other required operator-related components can have a significant impact on an asset’s reliability. Analysis was conducted on 10 years of work orders for five identical 1400 HP shovels and three identical 1470 HP shovels. The results suggest that removing operator-related components contribute to a 15% decrease in the number of work orders and an 8% increase in reliability. In an autonomous asset these components would not be required. The key to this analysis is a rule-based expert system used to clean more than ten thousand work orders and allocate events to specific sub-systems with associated failure modes. While the mining industry has moved to autonomous haul trucks and drills, there are as yet no autonomous shovels. For manufacturers looking at the business case for these units, the availability of data on the reliability increase from removing the operator-related components will be valuable information.