Klaus
03-31-2003, 11:05 AM
Book chronicles making of an urban legend
By David Kiley, USA TODAY
DETROIT — Sitting fat in the middle of the debate about whether hulking SUVs are Satan's station wagons is the Hummer H2. And the book Hummer H2, by Road and Track editor Matt DeLorenzo and photographer John Lamm, tells the story of how this behemoth was turned into the hottest piece of road candy for General Motors since the Corvette.
Hummer H2, by Matt DeLorenzo and photographer John Lamm; Motorbooks International, 128 pages, $19.95.
How GM came to own the brand even makes a good yarn.
The world's biggest automaker was developing some tough and burly trucks and SUVs in the mid-1990s. But its own research showed that no matter how good GM's iron was, those consumers who weekend at monster-truck rallies, rodeos and national park trails would still see GM's Chevy and GMC brands as runners-up to Jeep and Ford.
AM General, the defense contractor who built the Humvees that became famous in the last Persian Gulf War, had built a peacetime street version of the big military Hummer. But the company was perennially short of the cash needed to develop more mainstream vehicles that could exploit the allure of the brand.
Enter GM in 1999. Though AMG had received calls from other companies wanting to buy it out, CEO Jim Armour took a meeting with GM for the simple reason that a committee of GM executives ogling the brand to take the place of Oldsmobile in its stable said they would come to AMG's Indiana headquarters instead of expecting Armour to come to them with his hand out.
Armour didn't want to sell, and he didn't want to just license the brand to GM for fear it would slap Hummer's valuable badge on a titanium-grilled Chevy Suburban and call it a Hummer. He wanted to stay in business, and to use GM's deep pockets to grow the business.
The result was an unusual deal wherein GM bought the brand, developed the new, smaller Hummer H2 with AMG and had the Humvee maker build it for them in a new Indiana plant in AMG's backyard that went up in just 14 months.
DeLorenzo, who has written about other pop culture cars, such as Volkswagen's New Beetle and Chrysler's PT Cruiser, reports tasty tidbits about the levels of secrecy that had GM designers working on design schemes for the H2 at their homes before an agreement was reached, so GM could show an H2 concept vehicle at the January 2000 Detroit Auto Show, just weeks after announcing the deal.
With all the precision and advanced technology consumers see at today's car shows, its comical to read about designers working to screw and literally "tape" the H2 together as it rode in a truck to the show arena, the lead designer even forgetting to bolt the seats down before he drove it into the footlights.
If the authors spend seemingly too many pages rattling off the capabilities and features of the H2, it's because it is like no other vehicle on the road today — as smooth as a Chevy Suburban (with which it shares a platform) on the road, but able to traverse 20 inches of water and grades above 45 degrees like the big Humvee.
The chronicle should interest Hummer customers, a number GM expects to be 200,000 after two more products hit the market this decade.
It also captures how H2 is an example of what a revitalized GM can do when it frees itself from bureaucratic inertia and lets a few mavericks in the company have a go at something.
Developed by designers and engineers who had words like "defiant," "overbuilt," "intimidating" and "unstoppable" tacked up on the shop wall for inspiration (SUV bashers take note), we learn that Hummer buyers largely fall into two camps:
"Rugged individualists" who have ranches, four other vehicles and really go off-roading — 5% to 10%.
"Successful achievers" whose closest brush with off-roading will be brunch with the landscape architect — 90% to 95%.
For all the technical capability of the H2, the vehicle's 6,400-pound girth qualifies it as a commercial vehicle in the same class as a delivery van, and thus GM is not required to include its estimated 10 mpg when it calculates whether GM's total "light" vehicle fleet meets federal fuel economy regulations.
Where the book lets the reader down a bit is in not discussing the visual preposterousness of a Hummer H2, and the irony of an SUV made famous in the Gulf War being held up by environmentalists as the poster-boy for the oil-thirsty American SUV culture. This just as the United States faces another war in Iraq where the Humvee could again be a CNN star — a fact Hummer executives sheepishly admit should bolster sales.
By David Kiley, USA TODAY
DETROIT — Sitting fat in the middle of the debate about whether hulking SUVs are Satan's station wagons is the Hummer H2. And the book Hummer H2, by Road and Track editor Matt DeLorenzo and photographer John Lamm, tells the story of how this behemoth was turned into the hottest piece of road candy for General Motors since the Corvette.
Hummer H2, by Matt DeLorenzo and photographer John Lamm; Motorbooks International, 128 pages, $19.95.
How GM came to own the brand even makes a good yarn.
The world's biggest automaker was developing some tough and burly trucks and SUVs in the mid-1990s. But its own research showed that no matter how good GM's iron was, those consumers who weekend at monster-truck rallies, rodeos and national park trails would still see GM's Chevy and GMC brands as runners-up to Jeep and Ford.
AM General, the defense contractor who built the Humvees that became famous in the last Persian Gulf War, had built a peacetime street version of the big military Hummer. But the company was perennially short of the cash needed to develop more mainstream vehicles that could exploit the allure of the brand.
Enter GM in 1999. Though AMG had received calls from other companies wanting to buy it out, CEO Jim Armour took a meeting with GM for the simple reason that a committee of GM executives ogling the brand to take the place of Oldsmobile in its stable said they would come to AMG's Indiana headquarters instead of expecting Armour to come to them with his hand out.
Armour didn't want to sell, and he didn't want to just license the brand to GM for fear it would slap Hummer's valuable badge on a titanium-grilled Chevy Suburban and call it a Hummer. He wanted to stay in business, and to use GM's deep pockets to grow the business.
The result was an unusual deal wherein GM bought the brand, developed the new, smaller Hummer H2 with AMG and had the Humvee maker build it for them in a new Indiana plant in AMG's backyard that went up in just 14 months.
DeLorenzo, who has written about other pop culture cars, such as Volkswagen's New Beetle and Chrysler's PT Cruiser, reports tasty tidbits about the levels of secrecy that had GM designers working on design schemes for the H2 at their homes before an agreement was reached, so GM could show an H2 concept vehicle at the January 2000 Detroit Auto Show, just weeks after announcing the deal.
With all the precision and advanced technology consumers see at today's car shows, its comical to read about designers working to screw and literally "tape" the H2 together as it rode in a truck to the show arena, the lead designer even forgetting to bolt the seats down before he drove it into the footlights.
If the authors spend seemingly too many pages rattling off the capabilities and features of the H2, it's because it is like no other vehicle on the road today — as smooth as a Chevy Suburban (with which it shares a platform) on the road, but able to traverse 20 inches of water and grades above 45 degrees like the big Humvee.
The chronicle should interest Hummer customers, a number GM expects to be 200,000 after two more products hit the market this decade.
It also captures how H2 is an example of what a revitalized GM can do when it frees itself from bureaucratic inertia and lets a few mavericks in the company have a go at something.
Developed by designers and engineers who had words like "defiant," "overbuilt," "intimidating" and "unstoppable" tacked up on the shop wall for inspiration (SUV bashers take note), we learn that Hummer buyers largely fall into two camps:
"Rugged individualists" who have ranches, four other vehicles and really go off-roading — 5% to 10%.
"Successful achievers" whose closest brush with off-roading will be brunch with the landscape architect — 90% to 95%.
For all the technical capability of the H2, the vehicle's 6,400-pound girth qualifies it as a commercial vehicle in the same class as a delivery van, and thus GM is not required to include its estimated 10 mpg when it calculates whether GM's total "light" vehicle fleet meets federal fuel economy regulations.
Where the book lets the reader down a bit is in not discussing the visual preposterousness of a Hummer H2, and the irony of an SUV made famous in the Gulf War being held up by environmentalists as the poster-boy for the oil-thirsty American SUV culture. This just as the United States faces another war in Iraq where the Humvee could again be a CNN star — a fact Hummer executives sheepishly admit should bolster sales.