I test-drove the all-electric Hummer. Can it win over America’s EV skeptics?
It is the weight of an elephant, can move like a crab and in a previous life was reviled by environmentalists. The Hummer, that avatar of gas-guzzling machismo, has returned as an electric vehicle with an unlikely billing as an ally in the effort to avert the worsening climate crisis.
The reincarnation of the hulking pickup truck, test-driven by the Guardian in the searing heat of Arizona, has been lauded by manufacturer General Motors (GM) as proof that electric vehicles (EVs) can now reach even middle America’s most obdurate devotees of supersized car culture.
GM hopes to crush, under a brawny Hummer wheel, the notion that green cars only look like a Prius. “We want to turn EV skeptics into EV believers,” said Mikhael Farah, a GM spokesman. This Hummer has even been endorsed as a climate boon by the White House – in November, Joe Biden screeched around GM’s Detroit plant in a Hummer EV. “This sucker is something else!” the president, a self-confessed “car guy”, exclaimed.
It’s a startling reframing of a brand that was spawned from a spartan, military-grade Humvee and became a sort of muscular invading force on roads in the early 2000s. Arnold Schwarzenegger, before he started issuing earnest warnings about climate change, championed it. Boxy and unrefined, the Hummer embodied an outlandishly masculine aesthetic that seemed to almost revel in its gargantuan fuel consumption.
Even in an era where the size of cars has been put on steroids, concerns over the climate crisis made the Hummer a standout, cartoonish villain. In 2003, dozens of Hummers were vandalized and set on fire by environmentalists in Los Angeles, with many of the vehicles spray-painted with the words ‘‘gross polluter’’ and ‘‘fat, lazy Americans”. In 2010, the
Read more on theguardian.com
