General Motors is now set to unveil the all-electric Hummer truck sometime in the fourth quarter of this year, after scratching the original May 20th reveal due to the COVID-19 pandemic. But in the meantime, the company (and the GMC brand, under which the resurrected Hummer will be sold) is teasing a side profile of the truck — along with a more traditional SUV version without a pickup bed.
The Hummer silhouettes appeared in a new ad that GMC released on Wednesday shortly after parent company GM announced its financial results for the second quarter of 2020. GM posted a nearly $800 million loss for the quarter, which was better than expected considering the company — like others — went through a weeks-long pandemic-related production shutdown.
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GM announced earlier this year that it was reviving the Hummer brand for a bawdy 1,000-horsepower electric pickup truck, confirming months of rumors and reports that the icon of millennial excess was making a comeback. The truck will be one of the cornerstones in GM’s $20 billion push into electric vehicles. It’ll be appropriately equipped, with GMC saying Wednesday that the new Hummer will feature the second generation of GM’s advanced driver assistance system, Super Cruise. It’s also powered by the modular “Ultium” electric vehicle platform that GM unveiled in March, which uses a battery pack that can scale up to 200kWh.
The Hummer pickup truck is slated to go into production in late 2021, with deliveries starting shortly after. That’s right around when Tesla’s Cybertruck is supposed to hit the road and just a few months after EV startup Rivian will start shipping its own electric pickup and SUV. There’s not currently a time frame for the Hummer SUV.
While it may seem ridiculous to bring the Hummer brand back into a world where both temperatures and pedestrian deaths are rising, the potential profits are probably hard for GM to resist. Truck and SUV sales are rising fast, too, and they also make automakers the most money. (To wit, GM said Wednesday that the average transaction price for its full-size pickups increased by $1,526 compared to the first quarter of this year despite the pandemic and resulting recession.) Bolstered by the automakers’ willingness to give out loans that take more than half a decade to repay, customers in the US are increasingly swayed by large, expensive vehicles like the Hummer. As a flagship of the company’s new fleet of electric vehicles, there may not be a safer bet — save for the electric full-size Chevy pickup that’s also in the works.
