The Rise of the H2
How do you parallel park a Hummer? I have been wondering.
Having first come out with an SUV designed for rooting out Baath Party loyalists in the Beverly Hills area, the good people at Hummer have designed a sleeker vehicle, called the H2, which is becoming a sometimes-seen luxury item around town.
They are not exactly ubiquitous yet, these Hummers. But they’re around enough that you notice them. And I must say, the H2 is -- how do I put this without sounding like a total tool of the Bush administration? -- kinda cute.
At the very least, you would not go looking for pockets of Fedayeen Saddam in the Los Feliz-Silver Lake area without taking the original, more serious Hummer (the H1) as backup.
No, the H2, it seems, is designed for lighter urban-assault-vehicle diversions. Antiquing in Ventura, say, or wine-tasting in Paso Robles.
I can see how a future Hummer commercial might just be a guy and his date, valet parking an H2 at a Houston’s.
The H2 retails for about $50,000, much more if you want to customize, and it gets anywhere from 8 to 13 miles per gallon, depending on which Hummer rep you talk to and how big an idiot he senses you are.
The appalling gas mileage is supposed to make the Hummer -- and not those other behemoth SUVs -- a grotesque symbol of American imperialism and oil-dependent hypocrisy.
So rejoice, owners of the Ford Expedition and three-quarter-ton Chevy Suburban. The Associated Press reports that your energy-efficient vehicles get 14 to 19 mpg and 13 to 17 mpg, respectively. Go ahead, Mr. Expedition: Sit in your driveway and just burn fuel for no reason. You deserve it.
Say this about the Hummer -- it’s a more honest extension of our SUV fixation than the competition. The Hummer is long and big and bad. It could fit a very large gun on its hood, because-- hey! -- it used to have a very large gun on its hood.
I certainly understand the H2 more than these ooh-la-la Lexus and Infiniti SUVs, the ones that look like giant insects are taking over the city. I feel these cars are in the closet about who they are. According to a Hummer source I spoke to this week (OK, he was a Hummer salesman with a very colorful tie), Arnold Schwarzenegger owns a number of H1s and H2s. The Hummer-is-Arnold is the take-no-prisoners version of the more delicately titled ozone-depleting machines, like the Explorer by Eddie Bauer.
The Hummer rep told me the H1s aren’t moving anymore -- its mileage is “gas station to gas station.” But sales of the H2 are gaining steam, he said. In fact, maybe I wanted to climb into the showroom model, which Arnold himself had driven recently.
I got in the passenger seat; my friend got behind the wheel. It felt nice inside. There was a mini-DVD screen beneath the dashboard stereo. Good leg room. Convenient places to put your cup of joe. It was not hard to picture sitting in traffic on the 405, the stereo cranking, the moon roof popped, worried about running out of gas before I hit my offramp.
We sat there in the showroom, my friend and I, staring out of the massive windshield at Ventura Boulevard. What can I say, I was pleasantly embedded -- in a tank that wasn’t moving, in a city with year-round sunshine, in a state where Arnold might run for governor, in a country where his movie, “Terminator 3: The Rise of the Machines,” is No. 1 at the box office.
I had just had oatmeal for breakfast. I felt very, very safe.
Paul Brownfield can be reached at paul.brownfield@latimes.com.
