Faced with fewer buyers and soaring oil prices, General Motors has decided after a 14-year run to drive its gargantuan Hummer “Alpha” 4X4 into the sunset and shutter its production.
GM announced on Friday that production of the giant 4X4 known as the “H1”, based on a vehicle designed for the United States army, will cease in June.
The automaker cited a decline in high-end customers willing to shell out up to $150 000 for the huge four-door Hummer, which weighs in at up to 3,7 tonnes, packs a 6,6-litre engine and has a 7,8m turning cirle.
The company, however, will continue to produce and sell its smaller range of Hummers which are also more fuel-efficient.
Since 1999, the Hummer “Alpha” has been constructed and marketed in a collaboration between General Motors and AM General LLC, which constructs the military model.
“Unfortunately, in recent years, the production and actual retail sale of the Hummer H1 have fallen to a level between 200 and 300 vehicles per year,” James Armour, the president and chief executive officer of AM General, said on Friday in announcing the H1’s official retirement from America’s highways.
“At that level of sales, the GM dealers tell us that with a vehicle that costs $145 000-$150 000 each, it just becomes too difficult to find customers willing to pay for that vehicle … especially since we have not been able to change the body style for the last 14 years,” Armour explained.
Despite its demise, the Hummer H1 has had a good run.
Over 12 000 of the mammoth 4X4s have been sold since 1992 and celebrity owners have included California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, star of the Terminator movies and a proud Hummer owner.
However, in recent years the Hummer has been targeted by environmental groups, who have criticised its vast size and poor fuel consumption, around 4,5km per litre or 22 litres per 100km.
The Sierra Club-backed website www.hummerdinger.com, which pillories 4X4s and their makers, celebrated the “loss” of the Hummer H1 with a graphic of an upturned dinosaur and the legend: “Dead dinosaurs around the world mourn the loss of the Hummer H1.”
General Motors said it just could not make the “business case” to sink tens of millions of dollars into designing a new body for the H1 on sales of a few hundred trucks a year.
But the US automaker remains committed to the H1’s smaller cousins, the H2 and H3, which cost about $55 000 and $30 000 respectively.
The other Hummers are smaller than the vast H1, which is about 4,7m, and sip less fuel.
But there appear to be some limits to the downsizing.
The advertising campaign for the H3 notes: “Any smaller and it would be European”. – AFP