We’ve learned nothing, apparently. The GMC Hummer EV pickup might have clean and silent electric motors instead of a dirty old diesel under the hood, but it’s as irrelevant to the modern automotive mainstream as the original Hummer H1, as vainglorious a piece of automotive braggadocio as GM has ever built.
Underneath the EV greenwash is a gargantuan 9,000-pound vehicle that only has room for five people and can’t carry or tow much more than a regular midsize pickup. Yeah, it has 1,000 hp and 1,200 lb-ft of torque and will damn near wheelstand its way to 60 mph in just 3.0 seconds. But in the automotive scheme of things, the Hummer pickup is utterly pointless.
As pointless, in fact, as a Ferrari 812 Superfast or Lamborghini Aventador. But what’s galling is cars like the Superfast and Aventador are living on borrowed time, as tougher noise and emissions and fuel consumption regulations close in on their glorious naturally aspirated V-12 engines. The energy-guzzling Hummer pickup gets a free pass because it’s an EV. This is the future.
Or is it?
Automotive history is being rewritten by the wholesale switch to electric vehicles that’s clearly underway around the world. Old assumptions are being thrown away and new certainties revealed, and automakers are scrambling to make sense of it all.
The GMC Hummer EV pickup may be pointless, but it has a purpose: It’s a deliberately ostentatious vehicle designed to convince consumers who buy flashy, fully optioned full-size pickups simply because they want them, not because they need them, that there’s an electric vehicle in their future. But it’s also emblematic of an increasingly EV-centric auto industry’s struggle to find a technical solution to a social problem—range anxiety.
We’re going through the EV equivalent of the internal combustion engine automobile’s evolution in the early 20th century. Despite the computers and connectivity, all the algorithms and artificial intelligence, all the bright and shiny 21st-century technology, today’s mainstream EV is still an automobile at the beginning of its evolutionary curve.
In the early 20th century, big power required big engines: The Fiat S76, built in 1910 and nicknamed “the Beast of Turin,” made almost 300 horsepower from a four-cylinder engine that displaced a gigantic 28.4 liters. In the early 21st century, big range requires big batteries: The GMC Hummer has a massive 200-plus-kWh battery so it can travel more than 300 miles between charges.
The problem is current battery technology means big equals heavy. The GMC Hummer’s battery alone weighs almost 3,000 pounds, as much as a Honda Civic. Only two EVs on sale in the U.S. that offer more than 200 miles of range—Chevy’s Bolt EV and Bolt EUV—weigh less than 3,800 pounds. Most EVs weigh, on average, more than 4,800 pounds.
“The current trend with EVs is we need more range, so we make the battery bigger, which means the brakes are bigger, the tires are bigger, the car is bigger; it’s a horrible spiral,” says Gordon Murray, the man behind the epochal McLaren F1 and the new T.50 and T.33 hypercars he’s building under his own name. That spiral, of course, leads to worsening vehicle dynamics. “Try and make a 5,000-pound car feel agile. It’s physically impossible.”
A man who loves an engineering challenge, Murray, along with his team at Gordon Murray Design, is working on a lightweight EV platform he says will be affordable and will make EVs much more efficient and better-handling. GMD is funding the project itself but has two global technology partners, and it’s now looking for production partners.
Lighter and more efficient: Mercedes-Benz is already thinking along the same lines, as shown by the Vision EQXX concept, which weighs less than 3,900 pounds and has a range of 620 miles. “If you think that’s extreme, wait until you see our targets,” Murray says. “If we hit them—and we’ve got a pretty good chance—it’ll change the way we think about electric cars and give us a brighter future.”
Let’s hope so.
Keyword: The GMC Hummer EV Is Pointless, But It Has a Purpose