2023-07-20 11:36:50
As General Motors Co. geared up in 2020 to go all-electric, it didn’t look like it was going to be a normal type of vehicle, starting with the Hummer.
In its original form, this gigantic off-road truck had horrible gas mileage and was a magnet for controversy.
But in a GM-paid commercial during last year’s Super Bowl, the electric Hummer became something else.
Its battery would give it even more capabilities than before: a staggering 1,000 horsepower and lightning speed, while also wearing the halo of zero carbon emissions.
But the truth is not that. and as is the custom of General Motors, the deception of the foolish consumers of this type of vehicle became obvious.
But if a mission was to get the Hummer brand out of controversy, it failed.
The new Hummer is once again creating divisions and starting a new debate about how big and powerful an EV should be. And, more importantly, the criticism against it could also apply to other large trucks and SUVs that are key to automakers’ electrification plans, from the Ford F-150 Lightning to the Tesla Cybertruck.
Regulators are beginning to address the issue, including National Transportation Safety Board chairwoman Jennifer Homendy, who delivered a speech Wednesday in Washington, D.C.
“I am concerned about the increased risk of serious injury and death for all road users due to heavier curb weights and the increasing size, power and performance of vehicles on our roads, including electric vehicles,” Homendy said, speaking specifically of the Hummer, saying its weight “has a significant impact on the safety of all road users.”
When the original Hummer peaked in popularity nearly two decades ago, it created a culture clash between off-roaders who appreciated the truck’s rock-jumping ability and environmentalists who decried its spectacularly wasteful 10 mpg.
In the mid-2000s, SUVs and trucks were starting to get big. None were bigger than the Hummer. Adapted from the US Army’s Humvee transporter, his biggest fan was Arnold Schwarzenegger, the admired cigar-chewing actor-turned-governor of California.
At the same time, a backlash against large vehicles was building. Many Americans turned to the new Toyota Prius hybrid when they realized the connection between burning gas and warming the climate.
The new emerging conflict is different. Pits EV Defender against EV Defender.
On one side are the same SUVs, or SUV wannabes, who appreciate the capabilities that the Hummer’s electric platform offers, like its speed and 1,000 horsepower.
Automotive reviewers have praised the truck’s special features such as variable obstacle clearance suspension, four-wheel steering, underbody cameras, and removable glass roof panels.
On the other hand, there’s a new generation of environmentalists and urbanists who say city streets don’t have room for a 9,000-pound beast that’s wider than LeBron James is tall.
“The facelifted Hummer no longer emits tailpipe emissions, but it’s still an environmental and social disaster,” David Zipper, an urban mobility analyst, wrote in a recent opinion piece for Fast Company. He cited data showing the Hummer is dangerous to pedestrians and cyclists.
He added that the Hummer’s battery is so large that the vehicle’s emissions exceed those of a gasoline-powered sedan, when emissions to generate electricity are taken into account.
The Hummer, he added, is “a warning about how the electrification of cars could go off the rails if regulators give General Motors carte blanche.”
Such criticisms worry those whose mission is to promote all kinds of electric vehicles. Ben Prochazka, the executive director of the nonprofit Electrification Coalition, believes a broad consensus is needed to persuade a doubting public that electric vehicles are for them, no matter what they drive.
“If we’re just building sedans, we’re going to miss out on a huge chunk of the market,” he said. “We are limiting ourselves if we limit the vehicles that we can do electric, especially right now.”
Excessive
The divide among EV supporters raises some tough questions:
In an age of rapid climate change and limited resources, should the United States simply reproduce the huge but wasteful SUVs and trucks that are so popular today?
Or should lawmakers steer drivers toward vehicles that are small and modest, and use fewer resources—in other words, the opposite of the Hummer?
Critics say the new Hummer EV is dangerous to people because it has too much speed, damages roads because it carries too much weight, and consumes too many resources that few people thought of when early Hummers were in their heyday..
In response to a request for comment late last year, the company sent out a long list of Hummer features aimed at keeping both the driver and those around the vehicle safe.
“The safety of our customers is a top priority, regardless of the powertrain type or mass of the vehicle,” Mikhael Farah, a GMC spokesman, wrote in an email. One of the typical lies of the manufacturer.
Meanwhile, General Motors, whose mantra these days is “Zero emissions, zero crashes and zero congestion,” never hesitates to point out that it is the only traditional American automaker to commit to electrifying all its vehicles by 2035.
The Chevy Bolt EV is one of their models that is on the market, but it is the EV with more recalls than any other EV model on the market. It will be discontinued by 2024.
General Motors went from being the world’s largest automaker to being several places lower on the world charts.
Their cars are the least reliable, the ones with the least resale value, and they only sell them for incentives and the boast of comfort, and for having the largest number of dealers in the United States, who have trapped their customers who cannot sell their cars for what they owe and go to the dealership to give them part of the payment, and of course, take another vehicle from the manufacturer.
The heart of the controversy
Every one of the complaints about the Hummer is intimately related to its Hummer-sized battery. At 2,923 pounds, the battery alone is heavier than a Honda Civic. Not to mention that to replace it they will have to reimburse more than $10,000 for each one.
The battery is the largest contribution to the vehicle’s impressive curb weight of 9,063 pounds. That’s heavier than the largest traditional Hummers, heavier than Ford’s heaviest pickup truck, the Ford F-450 Super Duty, and the same weight as three Toyota Corollas.
The weight of the battery is also on the minds of infrastructure advocates, who worry about the wear and tear that heavier electric vehicles will cause on America’s highways and bridges.
The battery also makes possible the instantaneous torque that gives the Hummer and other electric vehicles much better acceleration than traditional cars. This combination – the weight of a brick plus the speed of lightning – worries advocates of road safety in an age of large vehicles and reckless driving.
Last year, 7,485 American pedestrians were killed after being struck by drivers, the highest number in four decades, according to the Governors Association for Highway Safety. Larger, heavier vehicles generally cause more carnage than smaller ones.
“I am distraught that we are missing this opportunity to link climate health issues to literal highway safety,” Leah Shahum said. She is the founder of the Vision Zero Network, a non-profit organization that aims to redesign cities to make the streets safer for pedestrians and cyclists.
The Vision Zero Network website advocates calming traffic by slowing vehicles and building features like roundabouts, (very similar to European ones), while incentivizing transit and smaller vehicles over menacingly sized personal vehicles. from a tank.
The battery is of increasing importance to those considering the limited resources of the Earth.
As Rodney Sobin, program director for the National Association of State Energy Officials, said in a recent webinar:
“The electric vehicle is not the magic wand that now says you can guiltlessly drive your 4-ton truck all over the place to buy milk.”
The topic of Sobin’s webinar was critical minerals, a previously unknown resource that future Hummer drivers might be forced to feel guilty about.
The rising wave of electric vehicles has automakers scrambling to find enough metals like lithium, manganese, cobalt, graphite and nickel to make batteries.
One concern is that prices for these materials will skyrocket, making electric vehicles inaccessible to the masses and prolonging the reign of gasoline-powered vehicles.
battery sponges
Given the scarcity of minerals, some wonder if it is wise to lock these resources in large private vehicles, which spend most of their time parked in a wealthy person’s garage.
That perspective led Olaf Sakkers, a mobility venture capitalist, to write a LinkedIn post where he coined a term.
“The consequence has been the creation of battery sponges, like the monstrous Hummer EV but also all Tesla’s, that suck limited resources into their overdesigned bellies and trap them there for a decade or more,” he wrote.
On Twitter, people in the mobility space have pointed out that a Hummer’s 205 kilowatt-hour battery could be split to power some 400 electric bikes. Put another way, it could be enough to power an electric bus that takes dozens of children to school every day.
The electric Hummer is even being tagged with a phrase that haunted the old gas guzzler: bad for the climate.
According to an analysis by the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy, a clean energy advocacy group, the emissions per mile of an electric Hummer are higher than those of a gas-powered Chevrolet Malibu sedan.
That’s because the power grid, with its own fossil fuel emissions, has to power that Hummer with torrents of electricity.
“Behemoth electric vehicles may still be worse for the environment than smaller conventional vehicles,” wrote Peter Huether, ACEEE transportation analyst.
While the Hummer’s superlatives make it an easy target, other large and desirable EVs are vulnerable to the same criticism because they come close to the Hummer’s prodigious size, weight, speed and use of battery materials.
Many drivers seem serious about buying electric Hummers
Some 90,000 people made reservations until GM closed the list last September, saying it couldn’t do more. But those reservations, for $100 and refundable, are a far cry from buying a Hummer, which in this model year is available for $112,000 or more.
Those who have given only 100 dollars of deposit, have their hopes that someone will give them something more than 10,000 dollars to quickly take one of them and make their neighborhood praise. There will always be a neighbor so you want to show something else in your garage.
For now GM and according to reports, they have not been able to deliver even 5000 of the Hummer ordered, since many have left the factory with problems, and they are still trying to solve them.
whisper campaigns
The backlash against the Hummer and other heavy electric vehicles is still in the murmur stage and has yet to turn into corporate shaming campaigns or policy proposal packages.
It appeared last year in Washington, DC, where the city raised heavy vehicle registration fees. The premise: Heavier vehicles cause the city to spend more to repair road damage and lead to more serious accidents.
Starting in 2024, drivers with vehicles over 6,000 pounds will pay an additional $500 fee and vehicles over 3,500 pounds a more modest surcharge.
However, there is an incentive for electric vehicles. To encourage their purchase, the city reduced the taxable weight of any electric vehicle by 1,000 pounds.
State motor vehicle departments could sculpt fleets of vehicles to meet climate goals. They would do this by adapting registration fees to encourage climate-friendly factors such as low weight, fuel efficiency, fewer miles driven, or proximity to traffic.
While disagreement grows over the wisdom of electric giants like the Hummer, most EV advocates approach the conversation on tiptoes.
After all, all the players in the debate—vehicle safety guys, resource experts, electrification advocates, even many would-be Hummer drivers—agree that vehicle electrification needs to happen as soon as possible, and they want to be on a united front.
The question is how to think and talk about the Hummer, which has once again become a magnet for fighting, and a totally damaging vehicle for the environment.
“People don’t know what to do,” said Shahum of the Vision Zero Network, who said he has raised the issue cautiously in discussions with a partner environmental nonprofit, the Natural Resources Defense Council.
Source: eenews
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