Opinion - News Analysis

End of the road for Hummer?

In 1990, Arnold Schwarzenegger contacted AM General, manufacturer of High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicle (Humvee) to demand one for himself, but the firm said no: As an army vehicle, it didn’t meet regulatory standards for sale to the public. He 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, Mr. 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.

But times change: Mr. 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 U.S. 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 last week, faced with plummeting 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.

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