Wow, I guess I am a little slow. It took me almost a year to realize the Humvee is no longer in production. Done, caput….good riddance I say. This thing was a $140,000 road beast. I wonder if it was all the pressure from environmentalists? Or perhaps people who wanted to spend $140,000 on a vehicle decided to buy a home instead - a home for someone who really needed one.
A little over one year ago this is what the New York Times reported on the fall of the beast….
“G.M. said Friday that it expected to stop building the H1, flagship of its Hummer line, next month. The move comes 14 years after it first went on sale to the public.
The H1, originally called simply the Hummer, and lately known as the H1 Alpha, is derived from the military vehicle called the Humvee.
The wide, rugged Jeep-like vehicle captivated many television viewers, who watched it trek across the Iraqi desert during the Gulf War. Hoping to capitalize on Humvee-mania, its maker, A.M. General, quickly brought out a street-legal version.
About 12,000 H1’s have been sold to the public, including 4,000 by G.M., which bought the marketing rights to Hummer from A.M. General in 2000.
Since then, G.M. has added two slightly smaller Hummers, the stately H2, introduced in 2002 and the relatively petite H3, which went on sale last year.
Perhaps because there are more choices of Hummers, or because H1’s moment of military chic simply has passed because of the conflict overseas, sales of the H1 have plummeted.
G.M., which sold 875 H1’s in 2000, sold just 374 in 2005, and 98 in the first four months of 2006, according to Autodata.
With diesel fuel prices around $3 a gallon, it costs more than $150 to fill up the H1’s two gas tanks, which together hold 51.5 gallons.
And with G.M. on a push to recast its image as a green company, “it’s time for it to go away,” Mr. Pinelli said of the biggest Hummer.”
I know it is a slight delayed reaction…. (1 year - a blink of an eye) but halleluiah the beast is gone!!
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The Humvee didn’t die. Humvee is the military vehicle and more than 80 per day are being produced for the military. The vehicle you are talking about is the HUMMER H1. It was discontinued in June of 2006…and not because of environmental pressure, but economic scale and a joint decision between GM and the assemblers of the H1, AM General. As you note, it wasn’t a huge seller, but just a spinoff of the military Humvee. It filled a niche as the best off-road vehicle in the world. But probably only a third of those owned ever went on off-road events etc. It made sense for GM to concentrate on the rest of the HUMMER line, especially since they introduced the more fuel efficient H3.