2003 Hummer H2 on 2040-cars

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Team Miller Fisher finishes the 20th Anniversary Rallye A"icha des Gazelles

Team Miller Fisher finishes the Rallye Aïcha des Gazelles - Click above for high-res image gallery
Team Miller Fisher has crossed the finish line of the Rallye Aïcha des Gazelles - in a Hummer H3 driven off a Parisian dealer's lot - and battled from 51st to 12th out of 98 teams after a mistake on the first leg. The Rallye Aïcha, a six-stage trek through the desert, allows no use of GPS, no pace notes, no cell phones, and no binoculars. Pilots and co-pilots find their way between checkpoints with maps, compasses and pencils, and whoever completes the journey in the shortest distance, wins.
The race was made even harder this year by using not the 1:100,000-scale maps of years past, but scraps of paper with increasingly less route information as the race went on. Olympic skier and co-pilot Wendy Fisher wrote to say, "This continues to be the hardest thing I have ever done in my life. An unbelievably tough event. Days were SO long, almost impossible to get all of the checkpoints."

Junkyard Gem: 2006 Hummer H3 SUV

After General Motors bought the rights to the Hummer brand from AM General in 1999, it continued to sell the civilianized versions of the military HMMWV that was made famous after appearing in the heavily televised Operation Desert Storm. The Hummer H1 (as it became known) never sold in large numbers, but The General decided to make everyman Hummers based on existing GM truck platforms. The Silverado-based H2 came first, debuting as a 2003 model, followed by the Colorado-based H3 as a 2006 model. Here's one of those first-year H3s, found in a Denver self-service car graveyard recently. Now it's time for some Hummer brand history. After the American Motors Corporation bought Kaiser Jeep in 1970, it spun off the fleet and military parts of that operation into a new company called AM General. The best-known AM General products for many years were the Jeep DJ Dispatchers, generally called "Mail Jeeps," and they were sold all the way through 1984. 1984 was also the year that the United States Army put the first AM General-built High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicles (HMMWV, which soldiers pronounced "Humvee" at first but eventually adopted the "Hummer" nickname). Around the same time, militarized VW-powered sand rails were being purchased from Chenowth by Uncle Sam. After Arnold Schwarzenegger convinced AM General to build civilianized Hummers, sales of the not-so-civilized brute that became the H1 began in 1992. The H2 and H3 had the misfortune to be launched just before the Great Recession hit and fuel prices went crazy, while a couple of overseas conflicts that were much less popular than Gulf War I made grim headlines and reduced the street appeal of combat-inspired civilian wheels. The H1 got the axe in 2006; GM tried and failed to sell the Hummer brand to a Chinese manufacturer in 2010, as it struggled through Chapter 11 bankruptcy, finally giving up and killing the brand alongside Pontiac, Saturn and Saab. Then the Hummer name was revived in 2022 as an electron-fueled GMC model, and you can buy a 2024 GMC Hummer EV SUV right now (though GMC's website warns of "LIMITED AVAILABILITY" in big red letters, so you might have a hard time actually taking delivery of one). The final 2010 H3s were built for Avis at Shreveport Operations, which itself shut down two years later.

GMC teases Hummer EV's removable roof panels

Today was supposed to be the day that GM took the wraps off its GMC Hummer EV. We were told as much during the Super Bowl commercial, but GM revised it to an undecided future date, citing the coronavirus as the reason. Instead of the big reveal, we have a teaser.  The Hummer EV is going to feature removable roof panels, and now we get a better look at them. There are four roof panels and a front T-bar that come out of the truck. You can see what that looks like in the video at the top of this post. Comparisons to Jeep are obvious as the open-air experience is likely similar to the Gladiator and Wrangler with their hardtop roof panels removed. That zero-limits slogan makes a bit of sense from this respect. With the sheer number of roof panels, we suspect a single person will be able to remove them alone. In addition to the video of the roof, we get a small peek at the massive digital screens the Hummer will be sporting. Check them out at the bottom of the photo below. They appear to be two large slabs, separate from each other. Other details are scarce on the ground. We’re not sure when the Hummer will make its grand entrance at this point, but are still excited to see the 1,000-horsepower truck hit the road. GMC is still advertising the 0-60 mph time of just 3 seconds, too. The latest tidbit of news suggests that further teasers might be coming, so we could be in for a rather drawn out reveal process. Our senior green editor John Snyder got to see the GMC Hummer in person earlier this year at GMÂ’s EV Day and described it like this: “ItÂ’s a big, off-road-ready pickup complete with giant all-terrain rubber and tow hooks. It features removable roof panels for access to the open sky, which appears to be depicted in the teaser above. It features sail panels behind the C-pillars, similar to those on the Chevy Avalanche and Honda Ridgeline. Its bed was concealed with a tonneau cover, but it sported GMCÂ’s MultiPro tailgate that we first saw on the Sierra Denali. Interior photos showed a spacious interior with blocky shapes, squared hourglass vents that mirror the look of the taillights and a lunar theme that incorporates the topography of the Sea of Tranquility into things like the floor mats and speaker covers. It also has a large infotainment screen as well as a digital instrument panel.” Related video: