Hummer sales slumping, but owners love their rides
By Meagan Sexton Journal staff writer and The Associated Press | Posted: Sunday, July 27, 2008
Rob Powers shows his Hummer. (Staff photo by Jerry Mennenga)
She works hard, plays hard and has some fun all day long until the job is done.
She drives a Hummer.
Dawn Reisdorph, who loved Tonka trucks as a child, was inspired as an adult to buy a Humvee. To her way of thinking, the supersized SUV is the adult version of her favorite childhood toy.
Reisdorph, owner of Hydraulic Sales in Sioux City, said she loves her Hummer because it's big, fun and in a league of its own.
"It's something different you don't see around town too much," Reisdorph said. "I used to play with trucks when I was a kid, and it felt like riding it a big Tonka truck."
She also owns a motorcycle, but in bad weather or to run errands she prefers driving a bigger vehicle. And she plans to tough out the rising price of gas.
The soaring cost of feeding a vehicle that swallows a gallon every dozen miles is only part of a problem Hummer owners could face.
Environmentalists, who've always had it in for Hummer drivers, are winning mainstream converts. General Motors, which presided over Hummer's transition from a badge of military bravado to a symbol of driveway excess, is looking to sell.
It's possible that 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.
Rob Powers, programming director for Clear Channel in Sioux City, said his Hummer has become more than something to drive. It's become his hobby.
" As far as the Hummer itself, I don't regret buying it," Powers said. "I would buy another one tomorrow."
Cars are much more than transportation to Americans. In a country where life revolves around the car, you are what you drive, experts say.
"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 provokes both intense love and hatred.
"It has no aesthetics," said Craig Mac Nab, spokesman for AM General, which won the contract to build a new military tactical vehicle in 1983. "It screams at you from across the street: 'I look this way because I need to.'"
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, now under contract to General Motors.
"Someone smashed into the back of me, but I just stared," Schwarzenegger said. "'Oh my God, there is the vehicle,' I said. And from then on, I was possessed."
Powers, of Sioux City, does own another car. When he wakes up in the morning he decides whether or not he's in the mood to drive his Hummer.
He said it has nothing to do with gas prices.
"I accessorize my Hummer," he said. "Hummer is not a car you're going to buy if you have a couple of children. It's kind of a toy. If you buy a Hummer, you really don't spend a lot of time thinking about gas prices."
Meagan Sexton can be reached at 293-4243 or meagansexton@siouxcityjournal.com
Hummer's history
When the Jeep went civilian, so-called light trucks were a fraction of the U.S. car market, bought mostly by businesses who needed their power and capacity. When Congress set strict fuel economy requirements on car makers in the 1970s, lawmakers went easy on trucks, allowing regulators to set less stringent rules.
Detroit responded with vehicles classified as trucks but designed to win over car buyers. By 2004, light trucks claimed 55 percent of the market.
Regulators exempted trucks with a gross vehicle weight of 8,500 pounds or more from any fuel economy requirements, a loophole that critics say encouraged manufacturers to build mega-SUVs.
The first Hummers "raised people's eyebrows," says Tom Libby, an analyst with J.D. Power & Associates. Their in-your-face image appealed to buyers seeking pure utility. Libby cites his cousin, an avowed truck buyer, who declared SUVs "fake."
"He said the only one he'd ever consider would be the H1. For him, that was a true truck," Libby says.
Others aren't fans.
"It gave a lot of people a sense of vain superiority, that you're way up there above everybody else, and I think it gave a lot of people a sense of power," says Mark S. Foster, author of A Nation on Wheels: The Automobile Culture in America Since 1945.
Hummers and other big SUVs appealed to what Foster calls Americans' "sense of entitlement," accustomed to seemingly boundless land and cheap energy.
Hummers became icons, starring in rap videos and in movies like "Three Kings," alongside George Clooney. Marketers unleashed Hummer-branded mountain bikes and laptops.
"Let Hummer, the fragrance, take you on an adventure, an adventure like no other ..." a cologne promised.
But GM's 2002 introduction of the H2 -- mammoth, but much more polished and sold in considerably larger numbers -- netted enemies.
The Sierra Club took it on with a Web site, Hummerdinger. That was mild compared to FUH2.com, a hate site that drew hundreds of photos from people saluting the Hummer with their middle fingers.
-- The Associated Press
She drives a Hummer.
Dawn Reisdorph, who loved Tonka trucks as a child, was inspired as an adult to buy a Humvee. To her way of thinking, the supersized SUV is the adult version of her favorite childhood toy.
Reisdorph, owner of Hydraulic Sales in Sioux City, said she loves her Hummer because it's big, fun and in a league of its own.
"It's something different you don't see around town too much," Reisdorph said. "I used to play with trucks when I was a kid, and it felt like riding it a big Tonka truck."
She also owns a motorcycle, but in bad weather or to run errands she prefers driving a bigger vehicle. And she plans to tough out the rising price of gas.
The soaring cost of feeding a vehicle that swallows a gallon every dozen miles is only part of a problem Hummer owners could face.
Environmentalists, who've always had it in for Hummer drivers, are winning mainstream converts. General Motors, which presided over Hummer's transition from a badge of military bravado to a symbol of driveway excess, is looking to sell.
It's possible that 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.
Rob Powers, programming director for Clear Channel in Sioux City, said his Hummer has become more than something to drive. It's become his hobby.
" As far as the Hummer itself, I don't regret buying it," Powers said. "I would buy another one tomorrow."
Cars are much more than transportation to Americans. In a country where life revolves around the car, you are what you drive, experts say.
"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 provokes both intense love and hatred.
"It has no aesthetics," said Craig Mac Nab, spokesman for AM General, which won the contract to build a new military tactical vehicle in 1983. "It screams at you from across the street: 'I look this way because I need to.'"
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, now under contract to General Motors.
"Someone smashed into the back of me, but I just stared," Schwarzenegger said. "'Oh my God, there is the vehicle,' I said. And from then on, I was possessed."
Powers, of Sioux City, does own another car. When he wakes up in the morning he decides whether or not he's in the mood to drive his Hummer.
He said it has nothing to do with gas prices.
"I accessorize my Hummer," he said. "Hummer is not a car you're going to buy if you have a couple of children. It's kind of a toy. If you buy a Hummer, you really don't spend a lot of time thinking about gas prices."
Meagan Sexton can be reached at 293-4243 or meagansexton@siouxcityjournal.com
Hummer's history
When the Jeep went civilian, so-called light trucks were a fraction of the U.S. car market, bought mostly by businesses who needed their power and capacity. When Congress set strict fuel economy requirements on car makers in the 1970s, lawmakers went easy on trucks, allowing regulators to set less stringent rules.
Detroit responded with vehicles classified as trucks but designed to win over car buyers. By 2004, light trucks claimed 55 percent of the market.
Regulators exempted trucks with a gross vehicle weight of 8,500 pounds or more from any fuel economy requirements, a loophole that critics say encouraged manufacturers to build mega-SUVs.
The first Hummers "raised people's eyebrows," says Tom Libby, an analyst with J.D. Power & Associates. Their in-your-face image appealed to buyers seeking pure utility. Libby cites his cousin, an avowed truck buyer, who declared SUVs "fake."
"He said the only one he'd ever consider would be the H1. For him, that was a true truck," Libby says.
Others aren't fans.
"It gave a lot of people a sense of vain superiority, that you're way up there above everybody else, and I think it gave a lot of people a sense of power," says Mark S. Foster, author of A Nation on Wheels: The Automobile Culture in America Since 1945.
Hummers and other big SUVs appealed to what Foster calls Americans' "sense of entitlement," accustomed to seemingly boundless land and cheap energy.
Hummers became icons, starring in rap videos and in movies like "Three Kings," alongside George Clooney. Marketers unleashed Hummer-branded mountain bikes and laptops.
"Let Hummer, the fragrance, take you on an adventure, an adventure like no other ..." a cologne promised.
But GM's 2002 introduction of the H2 -- mammoth, but much more polished and sold in considerably larger numbers -- netted enemies.
The Sierra Club took it on with a Web site, Hummerdinger. That was mild compared to FUH2.com, a hate site that drew hundreds of photos from people saluting the Hummer with their middle fingers.
-- The Associated Press
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Big Picture wrote on Aug 1, 2008 4:50 PM:
Speedy wrote on Jul 28, 2008 11:44 AM:
ER wrote on Jul 28, 2008 8:54 AM:
BTW, it's not an entitlement if you can buy it yourself. The government isn't handing them out like they do welfare social security. Those are actual entitlements. "
BigO wrote on Jul 28, 2008 8:20 AM:
Richard sounds a little jealous!
I figure if they can afford it for for them. I can afford my big Dodge with the HEMI in it and thats what I enjoy when not driving the Harley. "
Richard M wrote on Jul 28, 2008 6:26 AM: