The Hummer

*Modified a bit from my original piece published 3/22/23

As early as 1979, the U.S. Army let it be known that they were looking to replace the tried and true Jeep with something larger and more capable. By 1983, several manufacturers had submitted prototypes of a High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicle (HMMWV) for evaluation. It was AM General, then a subsidiary of American Motors Corporation, who won the contract. Soldiers quickly tired of the HMMWV’s tongue-tying acronym, and nicknamed it the Humvee. The trucks first saw combat in 1989, during Operation Just Cause in Panama. Two years later, the Humvee became a TV star, as dozens of journalists reported on the first invasion of Iraq while crouched in the back seat of of one.

As legend has it, around that time, action movie star Arnold Schwarzenegger began lusting after the Hummvee. He had seen a couple of these the similarly musclebound machines while on the set of a movie he was making.

Trivia question: Which two actors in this film would go on to become state governors?

Upon discovery that Hummvees were not available to the public, Arnold launched a personal lobbying campaign at AM General’s management. His objective: Get them to offer a civilian version that he could buy. The star assured the executives that it made perfect business sense because all the other 800-pound gorillas in Hollywood would want one, too.

Of course, this was not the first automotive brand spawned by war…

What Arnold wants he tends to get. With development costs already paid for by government contracts - the military would eventually deploy 281,000 HMMWVs around the globe - AM General saw the logic in selling a few thousand more to regular folks… or at least regular folks who could pony up the $112,695 MSRP, before options, which were plentiful. The Marketing types quickly came up with a suitable brand name, and the Hummer H1 hit the streets in 1992. Arnold Schwarzenegger was its first customer. He has reportedly owned as many as 7 Hummers at one time.

While sales for civilian H1s was limited - a few hundred a year - the profit on each one was as massive as the trucks themselves. The trouble was that AM General still didn’t have sufficient resources to expand Hummer’s market reach. But the giant automaker General Motors certainly did, and in 1999 a deal was made whereby GM acquired the rights to market the Hummer brand.

GM proceeded to develop a more civilized Hummer, offering it at a somewhat more attainable price point. Built off a Chevy Tahoe chassis, the Hummer H2 debuted in 2002. It looked almost as tough as its big brother, but wasn’t really. This Hummer was designed to make its assaults on the suburban targets. It was the perfect weapon for Type-A personalities to menace the other parents in their kid’s private school drop off lines before heading off to battle for parking spaces at the COSCO.

The Hummer H3 followed in 2004. This “baby” Hummer was built on the midsized Chevy Colorado pickup truck platform. It could thus accommodate any of GM’s new Atlas series OHC in-line 4. 5 and 6 cylinder engines. But rather than use the deliciously smooth and powerful 270hp Atlas 6, the suits at GM, likely in some simbolic gesture toward fuel economy - chose the smaller 220hp 5-banger to power this 4600lb truck. The resulting performance? Let’s just say the H3 wasn’t going to invoke much fear in the hearts Middle East dictators. It took the GM braintrust a few years and some millions of dollars to adapt the H3’s chassis to accept an existing 5.3L pushrod V8 - one that was older, heavier, but not much more powerful, than the modern OHC 6 that it should have been there from the start.

It is decisions like this that a car company makes on the way to going bankrupt…

… which GM was by 2009.

In seeking a multi-billion dollar bailout from the federal government, management thought it prudent not to include the gratuitous Hummer in their plans for a New General Motors. It probably didn’t help the brand’s cause that an awful lot of those now demonized subprime mortgage brokers drove Hummers.

But Hummer wasn’t killed off because people didn’t want them – or that they weren’t profitable.  The brand simply became persona non grata in a sudenly austere 2009 society. Using the modern vernacular, we could say that Hummer was “cancelled.”

But huge, heavy, massively powerful, frightfully expensive vehicles seem to have become cool again…as long as they are powered by electricity. Thus, GM has now launched a new Hummer EV (electricity, humm, get it?) as a sub-brand of their GMC-Buick division. The Hummer EV Edition 1 (All nine thousand two hundred freeking pounds of it) debuted at the start of 2022. It has 1000hp and a starting price north of $113,000. Thank goodness for those EV tax credits!