Fuel costs fail to drive down Hummer passion

updated 3:25 p.m. ET July 26, 2008

PINE GROVE, Pa. - They rumble in on treads called Super Swampers, wearing their hearts on their license plates.

"PLAYDRTY," declares one behemoth from New York. "HUM THIS," dares another, from Ohio.

The digital board fronting the Shell station at Exit 100 winks back: "Welcome Hummers!"

In the fading light, though, it's impossible to ignore the sign at the Sunoco across the road: Diesel, $4.97 9/10 a gallon.

You've got to be tough to love a Hummer.

The soaring cost of feeding a vehicle that swallows a gallon every dozen miles is only part of it. Environmentalists, who've always had it in for owners, are winning mainstream converts. General Motors, which presided over Hummer's transition from a badge of military bravado into a symbol of driveway excess, is looking to sell.

But tonight there's no apologizing or self-pity in the ranks of Hummer die-hards. They're here to goad machines that can top 5 tons over boulders the size of Smart cars, through stewpots of mud obscuring who-knows-what and across obstacle courses of stumps, logs and stones — it's "like riding a slow-motion rollercoaster," one says.

Maybe mega-SUVs are going the way of dinosaurs. Hummer sales have dropped 40 percent this year. But these beasts and the men and women who love them certainly don't behave like endangered species.

"I told my wife when we bought this, 'Honey, we're investing in steel and rubber,' says William Welch, a Philadelphia surgeon who, cigar clenched between his teeth, offers a guided tour of his lovingly tended jet-black H1.

"If it was $10 a gallon," he says, "we'd still be out there."

One with the Hummer
Cars are much more than transportation to Americans. In a country where life revolves around the car, you are what you drive.

"We eat 20 percent of our meals in cars. We spend hour and hours every week (in cars)," says Leon James, a University of Hawaii professor and expert in the psychology of driving. "We see other cars as extensions of the people who drive them and we identify the character of the car with the character of the driver. There is this automatic connection that we make."

But even in American car culture, the Hummer is an outlier, provoking both love and hatred so intense they can be hard to figure.

That makes it easy to forget the basic scrappiness and necessity that gave birth to the vehicle in the first place. The Hummer traces its DNA to the Jeep, produced for the Army in large numbers during World War II.

"It was something that could go to places other vehicles could not go, yet it was reasonably priced," says Patrick Foster, author of books on Jeep and the company that built the Hummer.

The real hulk
Americans, watching newsreel war coverage, were captivated by the cars, boxy because they were stamped by equipment previously used to make washing machines. Farmers, service station owners and foresters snapped them up long before ordinary consumers dreamed of pulling a vehicle built to go off-road in to their driveways.

But by the late 1970s, the jeep had outlived its military usefulness. The Army invited companies to devise a new kind of vehicle.

A team led by an engineer named George Scharbach set to work in the Warren, Mich. shop of AM General, a spinoff of Jeep. Scharbach wore his lucky suit on the day the Defense Department announced the new contract. Maybe it worked. But the winning proposal was one strange automotive creature.

Its hulking body — more than 7 feet wide without mirrors — sat way up off the ground while simultaneously hunkered down in a low crouch, like an overgrown teenager trying to slip into a movie at kid's admission. Its wheels were pushed out past its corners and its drivetrain was yanked up into the middle of the interior, putting a huge hump between driver and passenger.

"It has no aesthetics," AM General spokesman Craig Mac Nab says. "It screams at you from across the street: I look this way because I need to."

Catching Schwarzenegger's eye
AM General called it the High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicle. Soldiers dubbed it the Humvee. It saw limited action in Panama. But in the Gulf War in 1991, the Humvee bulled its way into the public consciousness.

Arnold Schwarzenegger, then a muscle-bound movie star a long way from being the Governator, was driving along a highway in Oregon, on his way to the film set for "Kindergarten Cop." Heading the other direction, an Army convoy packed with Humvees, rumbled past.

"I put the brakes on," Schwarzenegger told reporters at the 1992 ceremony that AM General, besieged by requests, held to start production of civilian Hummers. "Someone smashed into the back of me, but I just stared. 'Oh my God, there is the vehicle,' I said. And from then on, I was possessed."

He was far from the only one.

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