Demand for Hummer Has Dealers Humming Happy Tune : Auto retailing: The civilian version of the Humvee, vehicular star of Persian Gulf War, draws showroom crowds despite $42,000 price.
Executives at South Bend, Ind.-based A. M. General Corp. were ecstatic in 1991 when superstar Arnold Schwarzenegger became the first civilian to purchase one of the manufacturer’s High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicles (Humvees).
Attention generated by the sale--coupled with the macho machine’s successful wartime debut during Operation Desert Storm in 1991--whipped up a publicity storm that allowed A. M. General’s factory-direct sales team to sell more than 300 Hummers--the commercial version of a Humvee.
Huntington Beach Jeep/Eagle was so pleased about being selected as one of the first dealerships in the country to sell the vehicle that it has added “Hummer” to its name. It also added a toll-free telephone number to handle the expected flood of inquiries (1 (800)93-HUMMER).
President Rick Evans said the dealership’s single Hummer has already been driven about 100 miles--just from one-mile test drives by interested customers. “There have been hundreds and hundreds of people coming to look at it” since it arrived Thursday, he said.
Evans said two of the $42,000-base-price Hummers were ordered over the weekend, and deals are in the works for about five others. He expects that the dealer will receive about 20 by year’s end and that all will be snapped up in days, if not in advance.
“At this point it’s how soon can you get it and what color will it be,” he said about buyers’ enthusiasm.
The dealership has two mechanics who happened to have been reservists who worked on Humvees during Desert Storm. It fully backs the vehicle’s reputation for reliability and toughness, said Evans.
The Huntington Beach dealer is one of 18 that maker A. M. General has established across the country in a plan to set up a nationwide chain of up to 50 outlets, A. M. General spokeswoman Susan Carney said. In the San Diego area, Hummers are being sold by Marvin K. Brown Auto Center in Mission Valley.
The Hummer is equipped with power steering and automatic transmission, but that’s where the similarities to conventional four-wheel-drive vehicles end, said Jim Van Haften, Brown’s commercial accounts manager. The vehicle is built close to the ground and has an extra-wide wheelbase that makes it almost impossible to flip over.
Powered by an eight-cylinder, 150-horsepower engine, the Hummer is “virtually unstoppable,” Van Haften said. “It will go where other four-wheelers just can’t go.”
That toughness was proven during Desert Storm, when U. S. military units used the vehicles to race across the desert during their recapture of Kuwaiti land seized by the Iraqi army.
The Brown dealership added the Hummer line because, “like the Cadillac, which we offer, the Hummer is at the top of the line when it comes to four-wheel vehicles,” Van Haften said. “Even the Range Rover, which is a first-rate vehicle, can’t go where a Hummer can go.”
Civilians began badgering A. M. General for a commercial version of the vehicle in 1985, when the privately held company delivered the first of more than 100,000 Humvees to the U. S. military. But A. M. General put the Hummer on hold in order to “focus on getting our military program running smoothly,” Carney said.
Brown has received 74 calls in recent days from potential buyers, Van Haften said.
A. M. General, which in the past manufactured buses for transit districts and utility vehicles for the U.S. Postal Service, views civilian sales as one way to counter “changes in defense industry spending,” Carney said. “As long as there’s an armed forces, there’s going to be a need for vehicles . . . but the defense industry is changing, and we need to diversify.”
A. M. General is marketing its street-legal Hummers--which are slightly modified to meet federal requirements--to recreational users, industrial customers and non-military government agencies.
But the added safety features and creature comforts don’t interfere with the vehicle’s military heritage: Hummers and Humvees are both manufactured on the same assembly line in Milshawaka, Ind., about 15 miles from South Bend.
Civilian buyers represent the most obvious market for Hummers.
“There are customers who are looking for something fun,” Carney said. “They do a lot of off-roading, and this is the ultimate vehicle for them.”
But A. M. General executives believe that the Hummer’s largest market opportunity is the industrial sector, including “companies that have to cover a lot of difficult terrain on a regular basis . . . utilities, farmers, ranchers,” Carney said.
Hummers are also being marketed to non-military government agencies such as the U. S. Border Patrol and the U. S. Park Service.
Hummers will be sold through high-end luxury car dealers as well as dealerships that are best known for recreational vehicles and trucks, Carney said. Company officials declined to estimate how many Hummers will eventually be sold.
“It’s our first year of production,” Carney said. “We’ll be able to answer that better a year from now.”
