Oh dear.
Hi folks... a few H3's here in Bahrain, and to be honest they perform well.. I had mine since February, and done a load of offroading in it - no problems at all - got stuck once trying to pull out a Ford explorer - that was more my fault than anything mind you!
Anyway, it's horses for courses - sure, let the air out of the tires on a Land Crusier, Patrol or whatever, hoof it, and it'll go great in sand - in fact, I could do the same in my wife's RAV 4... Ok, here we don't have dunes like they do in UAE or Qatar, but there is still soft sand - I don't even bother letting air out, just switch of the Stabilitrak and off I go... so far I've had to pull out:
Range Rover
Jeep Wrangler
Ford Explorer
Mitsi Pajero
As far as reliability and "lack" of toughness? - bullsh**t!! I deliberately gave mine a real hard time coming up for the 10k service... some have seen the airborne pics etc - after service - no issues whatsoever... as for overheating, I've never had an issue - similar temperatures here to UAE this summer - 48-49 (52 in the desert!) degrees and no issues at all...
As for the locals - well, now more and more are buying H3's... but as we know, there are those GCC nationals who will continue to run the Hummer brand down in favour of Land Cruiser etc (for our USA readers, you never seen so many Land Crusiers in your life as we have in the ME), unless of course they manage to get themselves into an H2, and all of a sudden Hummer is the best thing since sliced bread!!
Now here's the deal - as I said we have mostly a mixture of rock and sand here which (no offence to the guys from UAE) takes a bit more skill and planning, and guess which vehicle outperforms ALL of the others?...
(and we get a bit of variety) as can be seen below
H3
Range Rover
Pajero 2006
Pajero 2000
Land Cruiser
Jeep Wrangler
Discovery
Volvo XC90 (surprising how well it does actually)
Ford Explorer
Jeep Cherokee Sport
I'm happy and would not hesitate to recommend the H3 to anyone!!!!
Xof in H3 - gonna be in Qatar this month - unfortunately it'll be 26th-30th!!... catch you next time?
Cheers!
JFF