The Rise and Fall of Hummer

The birth of Hummer came in 1977 when the U.S. Military needed a new general utility vehicle as a replacement for the then outdated Jeep. They granted a contract to the American Motors Corporation (AMC) to produce a vehicle new vehicle. This would become the HMMWV, or more commonly known as the Humvee, which became an iconic vehicle with media coverage of the Gulf War in the early 1990s. 

Now the birth of the civilian model of the Hummer itself came after famed actor and bodybuilder Arnold Schwarzenegger saw a column of Humvees drive by a movie set he was working on in Oregon. After several years of lobbying to AMC, a civilian version of the Humvee, the Hummer, was produced in 1992. 

Schwarzenegger made the Hummer famous by driving it around Los Angeles, and it quickly became popular. Throughout the 90s, the Hummer steadily grew in popularity, and by 1998, General Motors saw its potential as a brand. Initially, the Hummer was very profitable, as each vehicle would sell for between 50,000 and 100,000 dollars apiece. 

General Motors then rebranded the original Hummer into the Hummer H1, and created a slightly less massive model, the Hummer H2, in 2002. Things were looking great for Hummer. By 2004, 30,000 vehicles were sold. Hummer reached its peak in 2006, with the release of the Hummer H3, a more normal-sized SUV, with 54,000 units sold. After 2006, things went downhill. Hummer sold roughly only 44,000 units in 2007, only 21,000 in 2008, and a meager 5,000 in 2009, before shutting down during GM’s bankruptcy in 2010. 

So what went wrong? How did one of America’s most iconic vehicles completely fall off in the span of a couple of years? A large portion of this plays in with gas prices, issues with the vehicles themselves, and the poor environmental impacts of driving a Hummer. The original Hummer, sold throughout the 1990s, had a very underpowered engine. For instance, in 1995, the Hummer model weighed three and a half tons, but only had an engine that generated 170 horsepower, giving the vehicle poor gas mileage. While Hummer gradually worked to improve the gas mileage of their vehicles, the greatest they ever achieved was with the H3 model, which at best had a gas mileage of 13 miles per gallon in the city, which is still relatively poor. The inefficiency of Hummer caused many environmental concerns, and it became a resented vehicle in American society.

Hummer’s decline also can be attributed to rising gas prices during the great recession of 2007-2009, when gas prices doubled. The increasingly higher cost of driving a Hummer dissuaded buyers from the Hummer, explaining the drop in purchases beginning in 2007. 

So where is Hummer today? While Hummers have been out of production for nearly a decade, there is still somewhat of a niche market for them. Since the U.S. Military Humvee, the vehicle the Hummer was first modeled after, has been replaced by a new vehicle, surplus Humvees are being sold on online auctions. Companies such as Predator Inc. and Mil-Spec Automotive work to convert these surplus Humvees into usable civilian vehicles. 

With the recovery of the U.S. economy after the recession, and the rise in popularity of Jeep, an off-roading vehicle similar to the Hummer, perhaps the Hummer could make a comeback as a more fuel-efficient vehicle.

Sources:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C7IvcKhZvD8

https://www.quirks.com/articles/the-strange-tale-of-hummer-the-life-and-death-of-a-brand

https://www.army-technology.com/features/featureend-of-an-icon-the-rise-and-fall-of-the-humvee-4381884/