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2022 Hummer EV Edition 1 pickups ready to go to customers

It's official: Two years after GM announced the electric GMC Hummer pickup, the first couple dozen units have left the line at the GM Factory Zero Detroit-Hamtramck Assembly Center, according to GM president Mark Reuss. In an interview with CNBC to celebrate the milestone, Reuss said 17 Hummer EVs are ready for delivery to customers. This makes the Hummer the first of GM's new Ultium-based EVs to leave the factory, and the second electric pickup on the market after the Rivian R1T. The first 1,200 Hummer EVs made will be Edition 1 models, all of which are Interstellar White outside with Lunar Horizon interiors and bronze badging. Each of the $112,595 pickups is powered by three Ultium motors producing a GM-estimated 1,000 horsepower and 11,500 pound-feet of torque, loaded with features like height-adjusting adaptive suspension, skid rails and rock sliders, 35-inch tires, the diagonal-driving CrabWalk, the launch control system Watts to Freedom that unlocks a three-second sprint to 60 miles per hour, and Super Cruise. Range is a GM-estimated 329 miles when the 200-kWh battery is fully charged. As these filter out to eager owners, GM is prepping the next four phases of the Hummer rollout. About a year from now, in autumn of 2022, Factory Zero will begin production of the first widely available Hummer, the EV3X pickup that starts at $99,995 before destination. Three Ultium motors will provide an estimated 800 horsepower and 9,500 pound-feet of torque to a range estimated beyond 300 miles. Spring of 2023 is expected to deliver the Hummer EV2X pickup at an MSRP of $89,995, utilizing two motors producing a total 625 hp and 7,400 lb-ft over a range also estimated to go beyond 300 miles. Around the same time, the first units of the $105,595 Hummer SUV Edition 1 are planned to head down lines at Factory Zero. Finally, in the spring of 2024, the entry-level $79,995 Hummer EV2 pickup and its two-motor powertrain should arrive, making the same output as the EV2X, but only good for a range of around 250 miles. That won't be all we see from Factory Zero, either. GM invested $2.2 billion in the Detroit-Hamtramck plant that once built bread-and-butter GM fare like the Chevrolet Impala, Buick LaCrosse, and Oldsmobile Toronado in order to turn the facility into its first EV base of manufacturing operations for Ultium products. The battery-electric Chevrolet Silverado and GMC Sierra pickups will be built there, as will the Cruise Origin robotaxi.

Texas sues GM, saying it tricked customers into sharing driving data sold to insurers

Texas filed a lawsuit Tuesday against GM over years of alleged abuse of customers' data and trust. New car owners were presented with a "confusing and highly misleading" process that was implied to be for their safety, but "was no more than a deceptively designed sales flow" that surrendered their data for GM to sell. The suit contends that at no point was selling driving data ever even suggested as a possibility, putting GM in violation of the state's consumer protection laws. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is seeking a jury trial and at least $10,000 per offense (every GM car sold in the state since 2015) and a hefty add-on of $250,000 in cases where the victim was over 65. Texas seems to be flying high after a recent $1.4 billion settlement from Meta over other privacy concerns. This may well be a way to solve any pending budgetary issues in the Lone Star State.

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.