It’s three years and counting since the Hummer H1 went out of production. With it went the soul of a brand that came to represent the ultimate in off-road excess – and whose huge terrain-taming abilities were as nothing compared to its mighty proportions and sensationally rude image. But the military Humvee on which it was based is still very much alive – so have we really seen the last of the only Hummer worthy of the name?
There can be no doubt that the vehicle you choose to drive says a lot about you as a person. When you consider the huge range of criteria we have to consider before selecting a make and model, from cost to comfort, from size to safety, from practicality to green-ness, you realise how much information you’re giving away about yourself by simply driving around. You might not always be aware of it, but your taste, income bracket, status, age, outlook and even your dreams and aspirations are being displayed every time you get behind the wheel. Consider how often, during the first few minutes of talking to someone we’ve met for the first time, we’ll ask them what they drive. Consider also how some people will do everything they can to mention their car, casually dropping into the conversation the fact that they’ve got a Porsche or whatever. This is of course very useful for the rest of us, because we know to hate them without having to waste any more time listening to them.
But there’s one kind of car you don’t even need to ask about, because you’ve already seen it arrive. You had to take a look when it pulled up, to see what it was that was blocking out the sun. If the car you drive tells the world what you’re like, there can’t be much that’ll divide opinions about you the way a Hummer will. ‘Microscopic penis’ is sure to be a popular response… but for everyone sternly loathing you for your choice of wheels, there’ll be another silently applauding your bottle, sense of fun and sheer chutzpah.
The vast majority of Hummers in the UK are of course H2s and H3s. But say the word in a crowd and everyone will picture the full-sized original, which went on to become known as the H1 – before finally succumbing to the inevitable and going out of production in 2006.
Even in America, where roads are so wide they need a McDonald’s halfway across for jaywalkers to replenish their excess calorie levels, the H1 was always a ridiculously oversized, impractical way of getting about. Seemingly almost as wide as it was long, yet somehow managing to combine its enormous exterior dimensions with an interior whose lack of useful space left scientists baffled, there was only ever one reason to buy one: image. But what an image it projects! Mean, macho, rugged, tough, muscle-bound… Picture its owner, and you’d probably imagine a faintly ludicrous body builder, obsessed with martial arts and prone to kissing his biceps after flexing them in front of the mirror while posing around the gym in lycra shorts with a banana stuffed down them.
Famously, the H1’s biggest fan is Arnold Schwarzenegger, who requested the very first production model and once owned a whole fleet of the things. He wasn’t alone, though. During the fourteen years in which the H1 was built, Hummer sold 12,000 of them, mostly to wealthy posers looking for a good way of making sure they’d get noticed while cruising round town. Particularly ironic, considering the road is one place it was never meant to go; the H1 was at its weakest on tarmac, yet very few of its owners ever took it off-road. Had they done so, they’d have entered a world whose facts and figures read like something from a superhero’s fantasy. Along with a 406mm ground clearance (roughly double that of an average SUV), the vehicle was designed to climb a 60% incline, cling to a 40% slope, carry a 2500kg payload and ford through 762 millimetres of water.
What’s more, it had to be capable of driving through the most extreme conditions on the planet, from the frozen Artic to the hottest deserts, and have a service life of at least 15 years. Oh, and just for that final James Bond touch, it had to stay on the button after being dropped from an aircraft.
Considering all this, it’s quite surprising that Arnie didn’t commission a movie based solely on the vehicle’s attributes. However, all these special features were not there simply to arouse The Terminator every time he climbed into the cabin. The vehicle was there to do a job, having originally been built to meet the rigorous demands of Uncle Sam.
By the end of the 1970s, the US Army had concluded that its modified civilian trucks, which mainly consisted of venerable old Jeeps, were now obsolete and impractical. To replace them, a larger general-purpose vehicle was required, which needed to be efficient at moving soldiers and light equipment to the battlefield. In 1977, Lamborghini developed the Cheetah in an attempt to meet the army’s demands, though it quickly proved problematic, with a rear-mounted 5.9-litre engine giving it terrible dynamics while failing to develop enough power for the vehicle’s huge weight. The Cheetah did eventually spawn the colossal LM002, but Lamborghini’s hopes of winning a contract with Uncle Sam were effectively stillborn.
Two years later, the Army drafted its final specifications for a High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicle (HMMWV), and AM General quickly set to work on a solution, calling on all its experience in designing military trucks. Less than a year on, the company had produced its first HMMWV; after a rigorous testing programme that lasted throughout the early 80s, plus the manufacture of several revised prototypes, the Indiana-based company was finally rewarded with a production contract for 55,000 units, to be delivered in 1985.
Quickly renamed Humvee for ease of pronunciation, the original vehicle was widely regarded as an engineering triumph. Based on a steel frame with an aluminium and fibreglass body, it had fully independent suspension, automatic transmission and a 6.2-litre (379ci) General Motors V8 diesel engine producing 150hp and 520lbf.ft of torque. Design features included a small, vertical windscreen engineered to prevent light from reflecting upwards and giving troop positions away to enemy aircraft, chemical warfare resistant paint and a central tyre inflation system. At a mighty 4600mm in length and 2160mm wide, the Humvee was considerably larger than its military predecessors and was soon configured to be used as an armament carrier, ambulance, scout vehicle and missile carrier.
The Humvee first saw combat in the Gulf War, where it earned a legendary reputation among troops when, after being dropped from a helicopter and landing upside down, one was simply rolled on to its wheels and driven away. Through TV war coverage, particularly of Operation Desert Storm, the Humvee quickly came to the attention of the American public, becoming a household name.
Also watching was Arnie, whose initial interest turned into a full-blown love affair when a convoy of the vehicles passed him during the filming of Kindergarten Cop, leading him to petition AM General to build him a oneoff civilian version. Attracting a great deal of attention, others soon wanted a Humvee of their own, and the phrase ‘Humvee-mania’ began to be bandied around by several overexcited automotive journalists. Capitalising on this new demand, in 1992 AM General brought out a street-legal version of its military monster, still with that 6.2-litre V8 GM diesel but now rebranded the Hummer. Brought almost entirely by people who wanted to flash their cash, the vehicle quickly became emblematic of wealth and status.
Although pitched as an SUV, the first Hummer differed little from the military model.
Items such as brakes, differentials, frames and major body panels were identical, as both the Hummer and Humvee came off the same first stage assembly line before being separated midway through the production process to become either civilian or military models. The most notable differences were inside, where a premium stereo system, leather seats and several other creature comforts differentiated the Hummer from the spartan interior and cool canvas of the military issue. Yet in spite of this, many critics remained unconvinced by the Hummer’s ‘luxury’ pretensions – the seats may have been leather, but they certainly weren’t adjustable – and it was only ever regarded as semi-comfortable. Predictably, the vehicle’s battlefield attributes soon proved a huge disadvantage on the road.
With a 0-62mph time of more than 18 seconds and a stopping distance of 53.6 metres, for example, it was never going to be very relaxing to drive. Even its intimidating ‘move or I’ll flatten you’ stance came at a cost, as its width made for difficult driving on city roads and, combined with its length, made sensible parking more or less impossible. Worst of all, though, was the vehicle’s fuel consumption of 10 miles per gallon – among the poorest figures on the planet. As soon as the Hummer hit the highways, it was causing controversy. People instantly objected to its shape, size and insatiable thirst, and it was widely regarded as an embodiment of America’s greed, arrogance and extravagance.
A group called ‘Hummer Haters’ was quickly founded, and posted pictures on its website of members giving the Hummer a single finger salute. More extreme action, meanwhile, was taken by an organisation calling itself the Earth Liberation Front, which caused more than $1million of damage by setting fire to Hummers at a California dealership. The group also claimed responsibility for spray-painting slogans such as ‘Fat, Lazy Americans’ on SUVs at other dealerships in the state.
This did little to dissuade a long list of the rich and famous from acquiring the status of Hummer owner. In the first two years of production, AM General sold over 1500 vehicles, with celebrities as varied as Denis Rodman, Tom Clancy, Don King, Coolio, Andre Agassi and Bjork queuing up to follow Arnie’s lead.
In January 1996, AM General introduced its first turbo-diesel Hummer at the North American International Auto Show in LA. As well as improving on-road performance and significantly increasing power, the new model also included a much-needed seventeen-gallon auxiliary fuel tank behind the rear bumper. In 1999, further improvements were made with the introduction of the first traction-controlled Hummer with ABS brakes. In the same year, Hummer’s exclusivity ended when General Motors bought the rights to its name, re-branding the original vehicle as the Hummer H1 and starting work on a series of smaller, cheaper models. The first of these came in 2002 in the form of the Hummer H2, a new next-generation SUV designed by GM for manufacture at a new factory in Mishawaka.
Although the H2 had a similar appearance to the Hummer H1, it was slightly reduced in size and had a new platform taken from GM’s Chevrolet Tahoe SUV. However in spite of its more realistic price of $50,000 (the cheapest Range Rover in the US costs just under $80,000 today), the H2 still suffered many of the driving difficulties of its big brother, with its sheer size and weight contributing to poor dynamics and an absurdly low-rent interior making it feel less like an upmarket SUV and more like a small lorry in lip gloss and high heels.
The H2 was very heavily revised in 2008, meaning the model currently on sale promises to address everything that made the old one such a gruesome disappointment. But the real development had come in 2005, when Hummer launched the H3.
Based on the Chevy Colorado pick-up platform, the H3 mimics the H2 in trading on the rugged, squared-off styling that made the H1 such an icon. At 4742mm long and 1897mm wide, it was a lot trimmer than its hulking big brother, and with prices from $29,500 (which translate to £28,500 for the UK model, launched here in right-hand drive in 2007) it was bound to have a far broader appeal. Hummer’s slogan is ‘like nothing else,’ but at least the H3 was broadly comparable to vehicles like the Jeep Grand Cherokee – whose sales in the US have always been phenomenal.
And it worked. No matter that as well as sharing the H1’s looks, the H3 was equally dire on the road and staggeringly cramped inside for such an enormous vehicle. People flocked to it – and in doing so, they seemed to have recognised that Hummer was changing to reflect the new ways of the world. In the year the H3 was launched, year-on-year sales of the H1 fell by 16%. With this move towards a newer, more sensible product line, it was inevitable that the H1’s days would be numbered. Rising fuel prices and an increasing sense of outrage at gas-guzzling SUVs meant that even this most in-your-face of vehicles could no longer pull off its tell-it-to-the-Marines attitude. It was time for a swansong. And what a swansong it was. The 2006 H1 Alpha gained a new version of the V8 turbodiesel, now pushed to 6.6 litres and putting out 300bhp and 520lbf.ft, the latter from as low as 1500 rpm. Compare this with more modern diesels, and it’s not actually that impressive – the 4.2-litre unit in the Audi Q7 develops 335bhp and 560lbf.ft, while returning 28.5mpg compared to around 11-12 for the H1 Alpha – but the point was that rather than trying to tame its big beast, GM was at least letting it go out on a high.
Not that the word ‘high’ could be applied to its sales figures. Aided perhaps by a price tag of $128,000, the Alpha failed to halt a dramatic slide in sales, and with only 374 H1s leaving the showrooms in 2005 it was inevitable that GM would pull the plug. On 12 May 2006, the axe finally fell on a vehicle whose capacity to attract respect and scorn, lust and disgust, naked envy and outright hate, has possibly never been matched by any other in the history of motoring.
Announcing GM’s decision to halt production, AM General boss James Armour tried to shift the focus away from people simply not wanting them any more: ‘A fourteen-year production run without a significant body style change is very rare.
Obviously, we cannot make a business case to put tens of millions of dollars into an all-new body to sell a few hundred trucks a year. Therefore, General Motors and AM General, together, have made the decision that now is the time to discontinue production of the H1 Alpha series.’
No-one needed to say it, but the notion of it being time to give the Hummer an all-new body would have been absurd even if it had been selling tens of thousands a year. The real reason for the vehicle’s fall from grace was far more obvious: the times they are a-changin’, and the Hummer ain’t changin’ with them.
Many attributed the H1’s passing to the rapidly rising price of fuel in the US. But in a country reared on gas-guzzlers, it’s hard to accept that a customer willing to part with more than a hundred grand for a vehicle would be bothered by that. As Hummer’s General Manager Peter Walsh said at the time, H1 buyers were ‘less sensitive about fuel prices than most other drivers.’
More likely, it was the H1’s love-in with Hollywood’s rich and famous that did for it – just as it helped make it what it was in the first place. Whereas Arnie once owned a fleet of the beasts, suddenly the California glitterati were queuing up to be seen in planet-friendly hybrids showcasing the latest in green technology (while leaving their Rollers and Escalades safely tucked up out of sight in air-conditioned garages, naturally).
But Walsh was right when he added: ‘The Hummer DNA still resides in the Humvee… It will always be the core from where we come.’ Which is important, because whereas the H1 has reached the end of the road, the US Army still loves the vehicle as much as ever. Which means the factory remains busy, with not one of the company’s employees losing their job at the end of H1 production. At the time when Hummer’s civvy line-up was trimmed down to the H2 and H3, its military order book topped 50,000 units.
Which means the original, real-deal Hummer will be around for a while yet. Just as it was for several years before the road-going H1 first appeared. Could this mean the vehicle might even make a triumphant return once the economy has sorted itself out and the good times have returned?
It seems improbable, but with a more modern, less polluting engine, it wouldn’t actually be hard to imagine America’s car-loving public providing enough demand for the General to be tempted.
Hummer was recently ranked in second place, beaten only by the ultra-iconic Pontiac, among GM brands US drivers didn’t want to see lost to the company’s woes – which clearly means that to paraphrase Walsh, Americans love what the Humvee’s DNA stands for. Would a return for the H1 be a step forward or backward? The green campaigners who vandalised them in dealers’ car lots would no doubt be horrified, but if GM were to create a version that moved forward in terms of fuel consumption without losing any of the image that made it great, there could be few more powerful statements about the way America’s car industry is changing.
For now, however, the H1 is a relic, a curiosity, a magnificent act of folly and a reminder of a time when prosperity translated seamlessly into gross excess. Its truck-tough longevity means it will be many years before the roads are free of them, too – and solid residual values illustrate that even though new car buyers deserted it, it has become a prized classic among collectors and truck nuts alike.
Most of all, as the company itself says, the Hummer was and still is ‘like nothing else.’ Love it or hate it, you couldn’t ignore it, and you certainly couldn’t mistake it for another vehicle. Cost, dynamics, practicality, fuel consumption… everything was ranged against the H1. All it had was its image. And that alone was enough to make it a legend.