Hummer's uphill fight for survival

Hummer, one of the Middle East's best-loved motor vehicles, is under threat of extinction after General Motors said it was launching a 'strategic review' of the brand, as revealed in last week's GulfWeekly. Sales of SUVs are falling off a cliff everywhere except in the Gulf region and Russia. Oliver Burkeman investigates whether Hummer has reached the end of the road.

IN 1990, Arnold Schwarzenegger was driving in the American north- west, where he was filming Kindergarten Cop, when a convoy of 50 Humvees - the US military's rugged, wide-bodied transport vehicles - rumbled past.

Among soldiers, the Humvee, short for High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicle, was far from glamorous: it was a boxy, 1970s-era workhorse with uncomfortable seats, canvas doors, and an engine so poorly insulated that riders tended to swelter.

But Arnie was captivated. "I stopped my car and said, 'I've got to have this car'," he recalled, years later. "I saw myself driving in the mountains in this car. I saw myself driving in the desert in this car."

Schwarzenegger contacted the Humvee's manufacturer, AM General, to demand one, but the firm said no: as an army vehicle, it didn't meet regulatory standards for sale to the public. "I said, 'Wait a minute. Are you telling me, the Terminator, that I can't have something? That's impossible'."

As the journalist Keith Bradsher relates in High And Mighty, his book on the rise of the sports utility vehicle, Schwarzenegger launched a months-long campaign to pester AM General into creating a civilian version of the Humvee.

He won, and in 1992, the Hummer H1 was born: a seven-foot-wide behemoth, capable of climbing over boulders, or fording water two feet deep - and so unashamedly militaristic that the engine start-button was originally going to be labelled "fire". (The company's lawyers overruled that plan at the last minute.)

Schwarzenegger bought the first one that rolled off the assembly line.

But times change: Schwarzenegger is now the governor of California and, his fleet of seven Hummers notwithstanding, an unlikely hero of the fight against global warming. The militarism that surged through US veins in 1992 - just after the Gulf War, in which Hummers played a starring role - is gone, replaced by pessimism and anger over Iraq.

And this week, faced with plummetting sales, General Motors, which has owned the Hummer name since 1998, announced a "strategic review" and possible sell-off of the brand that had come to symbolise America's love affair with the gas-guzzling mega-car.

Among campaigners who had labelled the Hummer "the most anti- environmental vehicle in the history of the world", there was an air of celebration - as there also was, presumably, among those who had targeted Hummers for acts of apparently ecologically motivated vandalism.

"Mission Accomplished!" read the headline on FUH2.com, a website devoted to photographs of people giving one-fingered salutes to Hummers and their owners.

"Let's just say they're not selling like they used to," says Neil Kopit, director of marketing at Criswell Hummer, a dealership in Maryland.

Sales of the Hummer H1's successor, the slightly smaller H2, were down 27 per cent in 2007 on the previous year, and GM, which had come to rely on its sales of what the industry terms "large vehicles", has announced the closure of four SUV-manufacturing plants in the US, Canada and Mexico.

Nor is the decline confined to Hummers, or to America. British registrations of 4x4 vehicles fell by more than 18 per cent last month, it was reported.

The drop is part of a Europe-wide collapse in the gas-guzzler market: as a proportion of cars sold in France and Spain in the first half of this year, SUVs fell by 50 per cent and 35 per cent respectively.

The reason, of course - as manufacturers and analysts all agree - is rising fuel prices as opposed to, say, some kind of environmental crisis of conscience among buyers. Critics of the SUV tend to assume that those who drive them would be constitutionally incapable of such selflessness, which would be an annoyingly smug point of view if it weren't for the fact that market research conducted for the automakers themselves backs it up. The average SUV owner, according to studies cited in Bradsher's book, is "apt to be self-centred and self-absorbed, with little interest in their neighbours or communities."

In addition, they are "insecure and vain. They are frequently nervous about their marriages and uncomfortable about parenthood.

They often lack confidence in their driving skills ... they tend to like fine restaurants a lot more than off-road driving, seldom go to church, and have limited interest in doing volunteer work to help others.

In the case of the Hummer, the researchers reached another telling conclusion. Hummers, the GM researchers found, "tended to appeal to people who never performed military service, but wished they had."

The first Hummers sold at the rate of about 1,000 a year. Their enormous weight and cost - five tonnes, and $140,000 -_made them a highly specialised market, and a subculture soon developed among owners. Hummer clubs formed quickly, bringing enthusiasts together for weekend adventures in "extreme" landscapes and remain active today.

"The H1, man, that was an off-road machine that was just unstoppable," says Jim Bushart, parts director at Lynch Hummer in Missouri, the world's largest dealer in the original model. "The percentage of people that took an H1 and took it off-road and used it for what it was designed for was very, very high ... I've been in the deepest mud, on the biggest boulders; I've been sideways, just defying all the laws of gravity. If you were in any other vehicle, you'd be rolling down the mountain. But you're as stable as a cat in this thing."

As sales of other SUVs were beginning to demonstrate, however, the real money was to be made not among off-roaders but those for whom their vehicles' mountain-clambering potential would remain just that: potential.

"There are people who will use this vehicle to its fullest capability," says Kopit. "But then there are people for whom it'll never even see the grass on their front yard. They use it to buy groceries, but their personalities are bold and brash. Not in a bad way. They're just larger-than-life people."

Accordingly, GM developed the H2 and the current flagship vehicle, the H3 - a foot narrower than the H1, and about half as heavy - and ploughed money into developing the Hummer's brand image. (The H1 was discontinued in 2006.)

The company tightly controls the layout of its dealerships, all brushed-metal and glass, as dictated by Detroit - "every light, every type of tubing, literally everything, even the requisite big- ass fan," says Kopit, pointing to the ceiling.

Hummer-branded merchandise includes coats, hats, laptops and Hummer fragrance for men ("masculine with rugged and adventurous attributes").

Asked what they like about the vehicles, owners are as likely to mention the feeling of security as they are to refer to mountains or deserts. Oddly, given how relatively vulnerable soldiers are in the standard-issue unarmoured Humvee, the Hummer's military bearing accounts for much of the sense of safety.

"I've always said I'd like to drive a tank," one Detroit advertising executive and Hummer-owner told Bradsher. "There are lots of nutty people on the road, including myself - I'm a very absent-minded driver, so safety was important to me."

In fact, statistics demonstrate that SUVs, including Hummers, are no more safe than other cars for those inside them; for those hit by them, they are several times more likely to prove lethal.

The danger they pose on the roads was only one of the reasons that an anti-Hummer movement emerged, with campaigns led by the US environmental group the Sierra Club and the women's activist organisation Code Pink.

Their main objection was the vehicle's legendary fuel inefficiency. The H1 and H2 are so heavy that they qualify under American law as trucks, and are therefore not required to publicise their miles-per-gallon figures, but reports suggest that it lies somewhere between nine miles to 11 miles to the gallon (3.5 to 4.2 kilometres per litre), barely half that of the original Model T Ford. The H3 gets around 18mpg (7km per litre).

New fuel efficiency regulations signed into law in the US next year will make it harder for heavier vehicles to evade the rules - another motivation behind GM's decision to review the product line.

Just as much, though, what galls the Hummer's critics are the ironies of its appeal. It is sold as a safe vehicle, but relatively speaking, it is dangerous; it is sold as a vehicle for exploring the great outdoors, while contributing disproportionately to environmental damage and its purchasers believe owning it to be an expression of patriotism and support for the military, even though - as the anti-Hummer website FUH2.com argues - "while our brothers and sisters are off in the Middle East risking their lives to secure America's fossil fuel future, (Hummer) drivers are pissing away our 'spoils of victory' during each trip to the grocery store."

Not all objectors have limited themselves to verbal abuse. In Washington last year, in a neighbourhood full of Prius hybrids, 32- year-old Gareth Groves parked his new $38,000 Hummer on the street. It endured withering looks from neighbours for five days until, one night, two masked men broke every window with a baseball bat, slashed each tyre with a knife, and scratched "FOR THE ENVIRON" on the bodywork before running out of space.

"I'd say one in five people who come by have that 'you got what you deserve' look," a friend of Groves told a reporter.

GM has attempted to defend Hummers and has sometimes adopted a pose of defiance.

In 2006, it seemed to try, confusingly, to do both at once, with a commercial that showed a man at a supermarket checkout buying tofu and vegetables. The man behind him is buying enormous hunks of meat; the tofu-buying man looks embarrassed. He rushes out to buy a Hummer H3, driving off proudly while munching a carrot. "Restore the Balance," read the tagline. SUV-owners are used to the suggestion that their car might be a manhood-substitute, but hearing it from the manufacturer must have come as a shock.

The latest ads, entitled Hummer Heroes, boast of how the vehicle has been used in emergency situations from hurricane Katrina to wildfires in California. Still, there was a sense among dealers and critics in the US this week that the Hummer's moment as an iconic vehicle had passed.

"Fourteen years ago, we were driving Hummers in parades, and people would stand to attention and salute," says Bushart. "Now, it's come to mean something else."

In 1999 and 2000, Bradsher notes, Hummers featured in 32 films. Now you're as likely to see stretch Hummers serving as limousines for bachelorette parties; the brand critics claim is growing tacky. Fashions come and go. Then again, precisely because fashion is fickle, it might be premature to declare the death of the Hummer, he argues.

"It's possible that the next time there's a terrorist attack, or a war that prompts Americans to rally round the flag, there'll be a renewed burst of enthusiasm for Hummers."