What political or cultural message is sent by driving a hybrid or all-electric conversion of the Hummer? (You may use the H1, H2, or military Humvee in your answer.) Please write at least 500 words. You may choose to focus on any year since 1992 for the context of cultural presentation.
Submit the essay to your TA for grading before July 4th. (Argumate for sections 201 and 202, or Kontextmaschine for sections 203A and 203B.)
Really trying to figure out what the professor was thinking with this assignment.
Could the Hummer be reborn as a rugged electric SUV?
A report from Bloomberg cites sources, choosing not to be named, who said that the Hummer brand had been floated in discussions. At the moment it looks as though it’s an idea for consideration - and GM does still own the Hummer brand.
But at the moment it’s a long way from being any sort of confirmation. Companies are rapidly trying to turn out electric vehicles, with Tesla taking a huge slice out of the car market with its pure electric vehicles.
Well, the real problem is that the Hummer is fucking huge and weighs a ridiculous amount. Okay, okay, the real problem is that it’s fucking huge and weighs over a ton and we want it to have range.
Now, we could make it weigh less, maybe just shrink it.
Adorable. I’ll have one added to the motor pool at Misneyland. Unfortunately, I don’t think it’s quite what the existing Hummer fanbase would like. (And sadly, a civilian market version of the Joint Light Tactical Vehicle is just too large for Hummer customers to support. That’s getting more into the “Recreational Semi-Trucks” sector of the market.)
There are still a number of people out there that want Hummers [CarGurus (comments)] but they mostly say that they love the things, not why they love the things. We do get at least one bit: “It has gotten me out of every major storm in NJ.” Fortunately, someone over at Jalopnik had some friends drive an H1. They generally felt that it was slow, unwieldy, and handled like a boat… but somehow, most of them enjoyed the feeling of driving such a ridiculous vehicle. [Jalopnik]
So it’s a huge, sturdy-looking vehicle with a lot of ground clearance and possibly an underpowered engine relative to its weight. Did I mention its weight? A 2006 H1 weighs up to 8,117 pounds (3,681 kg). A 2006 Ford Explorer, by comparison, weighs up to 4,706 pounds (2,134 kg). (Of course, the H3 weighs a mere 4,883 pounds, so we have some room to work with here.)
I reckon if we double the mass of a Ford Explorer, we’ll need twice as much force for the same acceleration. (That probably has something to do with the early Hummer models’ 10 mpg gas mileage.) Of course, that doesn’t mean a plug-in hybrid electric Hummer can’t be done. In fact, it may already have been done ten years ago, if we can believe the stats on an unreleased vehicle.
[Raser Technologies] unveiled the prototype to the 2009 Society of Automotive Engineers World Congress in Detroit. The E-REV (Extended-Range Electric Vehicle) powertrain technology, was claimed to power the vehicle for up to 40 miles (64 km) on its battery, and then a small 4-cylinder internal combustion engine would start to generate more electricity.
Of course, if our customers merely want a hybrid SUV, they could just get a fuckin’ Toyota Highlander for 28 mpg. But this is Hummer, motherfuckers. We ain’t makin’ no damn Toyota.
So here’s what we’re going to do. Wrightspeed make equipment for converting garbage trucks (~33,000 pounds empty) into turbine-recharging electric vehicles, boosting them from 3 to 6 mpg. [Trucks.com, BBC] They also have smaller versions [Wrightspeed], suitable for converting those 15,000 pound UPS delivery trucks [PostAndParcel].
In another example, an Isuzu NPR, a medium-duty truck that achieves roughly 12mpg with a diesel engine, returned 44mpg after a retrofit by Wrightspeed.
Now, some people might say that micro-turbines just aren’t efficient enough for a small car. Some people might say that the era of the massive SUV is over, or even that the age of the automobile is coming to a close. But you know what?
Fuck those people.
To turn this company around, we don’t need meaningless defeatist attitudes. We need people with vision. And you know what we need?
Eight thousand pounds of Detroit steel.
Does eight thousand pounds of steel sound fuckin’ “car” to any of you? That’s right. This is a truck. Do not ever forget that this is a truck. And it is the last truck that any American will ever need. Pull a house? Climb a mountain? Fight a bear? This is the truck for you. It does it all.
So we are going to take the motive system for a 12,000 pound truck and put it in our new HUMMER H4000. We go wherever we want. We burn whatever fuel we want. We go as fast as we want. No one can stop us.
We are going to take that Toyota Highlander outside - who the fuck drives a fuckin’ Toyota to a GM meeting - we are going to - no I don’t care if it’s a rental –
We are going to fucking crush that Toyota Highlander.
Piston-trained mechanics aren’t going to know turbines worth a damn, same reason Mazda eventually gave up on the Wankel engine. The viable examples are fleet vehicles that are serviced in-house.
