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Date Posted: 23:15:00 06/17/08 Tue
Author: -S.
Subject: No more Hummers?

(I mean the SUVs, you naughty thinkers.)

Tough times for SUVs, no doubt about it. Now it looks like GM is about to srcap the Hummer, or sell off the division, due to plunging sales. And of course, this does not bode well for the Nissan Armada, which Nissan rolled out just in time to watch gas prices more than double. What do you think GM will do?

http://www.boston.com/cars/car_reviews/articles/2008/06/14/has_fuel_put_end_to_the_spectacle/?page=full
Has fuel put end to the spectacle?

GM reevaluates the future of the Hummer




By Dan Neil
Los Angeles Times / June 14, 2008

A couple of years ago, I parked a Hummer H2, in all its blunt-trauma enormity, in front of a coffee shop in Santa Monica, Calif. When I returned I discovered a note written on a paper napkin under the windshield. "This thing is so stupid! Why don't you grow up?"
more stories like this

America just got the memo.

General Motors Corp. said earlier this month that it was considering ways to downsize the brand - last month, sales plummeted 60 percent compared with May 2007 - sell it off or kill it outright. Chairman Rick Wagoner's "all options" remark didn't leave a lot of hope for fans of the quasi-military sport-utility vehicle. Obituaries will be many and eulogies will be few.

"GM killed the electric car and now skyrocketing gas prices have crushed the Hummer," notes Arianna Huffington, who founded the Detroit Project, an effort to pressure automakers to make more fuel-efficient cars.

"The Hummer embodied the worst impulses of the American auto industry," said Josh Donner, spokesman for the Sierra Club, which also created a shame-based campaign against the Hummer, including the satiric website Hummerdinger.com. "GM's move this week shows the absolute bankruptcy of GM's business model."

And yet Hummer lovers are a resilient bunch, and while the skirmish line has moved, it's clear many are not prepared to disarm in the automotive culture wars.

"Whatever the price of gas," said Glen Peck, director of the Hummer Club, a national organization of enthusiasts, "we'll drive them to hell and back."

The fate of the Hummer brand is by no means certain. GM, which bought the brand from military contractor AM General in 1998, has plowed a load of capital into Hummer, including $250 million in a plant expansion in Shreveport, La.

It has a pickup truck version of the midsize H3, the H3T, in the pipeline for a summer release. Meanwhile, product development is well along on a Jeep Wrangler-sized 4x4 called the H4.

Hummer is a charismatic brand with its own merchandising, selling everything from fleece jackets to flashlights. Even if the division operated at a fraction of its historic volume, Hummer could be an attractive proposition to a potential buyer. India's Economic Times reported recently that India's Tata Motors and Mahindra have each made overtures to GM about Hummer.

Still, if this is the end of Hummer, it would close the books on what will probably go down as the most controversial vehicle since the Chevrolet Corvair.

Hummer was always unavoidably political. The name began as a soldier's risque nickname for the "HMMWV" (High-Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicle), the mega-Jeep that drove into America's living rooms during news coverage of the first Persian Gulf War. In the early 1990s, AM General, allegedly at the suggestion of Arnold Schwarzenegger, produced a civilian version of the enormous tractorlike truck. It was here that the brand's cultural DNA was fixed as a twin helix of oil and militarism.

The H1 didn't arouse much ire, however, because it was a relatively low-volume vehicle; at worst, an appalling curiosity. It was the H2, introduced in 2002, that became the lightning rod for criticism. A 6,614-pound, 6-foot 8-inch Goliath, all armor and bolts and bumpers, with fenestration like gun slits and a grille like the bared teeth of a charging infantryman, the H2 set off a fury.

"It was just so over the top," said Michael Marsden, an auto culture historian at St. Norbert College. "It had excess written all over it, the SUV times 10. Everything about it suggested not practical, not reasonable. It was consumerism at its peak."

And fuel economy at its nadir. The H2 returned single-digit fuel economy at a time when the American body politic largely had squared off on matters of energy and the environment. "The eco-movement needs a villain, and unfortunately, the Hummer has been drafted to play the role," said Bryan Pullen, a Hummer owner from Davis, Okla.

The H2 was also featured in a minor drama involving the US Tax Code, which provided massive tax breaks for vehicles weighing more than 6,000 pounds that were used for business.

Clearly, for many H2 buyers, who never thought of taking the rugged trucks off-road, the H2's excessiveness was part of its charm. Hummer prospered in part because it came along just as automotive culture was exploring the limits of wild, chrome-rimmed excess: bling. The Hummer was embraced by hip-hop stars, professional athletes, and, of course, "CSI: Miami" detectives.

As the biggest, baddest SUV on the planet, it was natural that the H2 become the target of cultural blowback against the category, which came in many forms. Keith Brasher's 2002 book "High and Mighty" psychologized big-SUV owners as vain, self-centered, and insecure. It was the Hummer that became shorthand for cynicism and excess, an indictment of the American psyche on wheels.

Whatever profit-and-loss realities are at work in GM's plan, one thing is certain: The company, now desperately tacking to get on a greener course, no longer wants to deal with the contradictions and image liabilities that Hummer represents.

"Cutting jobs is never good press, but for a company to go green is," said Hummer owner Steve Scott of Plano, Texas. "This is GM's attempt to do both at the same time."

Hummer owners are feeling misunderstood. In spirited e-mail exchanges after GM revealed its plans, many point out that although the H2 is a gas-guzzler, the smaller, similarly styled H3, based on GM's midsize truck platform, gets better fuel economy than many competitive vehicles.

"When the H3 came along, it was branded. Hummer was synonymous with bad gas mileage," Scott said.

With all the controversy, perhaps it's surprising to find that people are still buying the iconic H2's. Tarek Abdellatif is now the lone salesman in the Hummer showroom at Clippinger Chevrolet in West Covina, Calif., where an arsonist firebombed Hummers on the lot in 2003.

"My sales manager quit two weeks ago," he said. "People are jumping like rats from a ship, but I stay because I love Hummer so much."

And for him, business is good. Abdellatif said he's sold "seven or eight" in the past month.

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