Stone Cold Killer Truck: GM's li'l Hummer H2 is one
rock-solid SUV
Say you’re sitting around
the campfire with your
four-wheelin’ buddies out
on the Rubicon or up in
Moab or in the Panamints
and you want to liven up the
conversation. Throw this
line out: “Boys, I been
thinkin’ this here Hummer
H2’s the best dang four-by
ever made.”
The sound of spoons
scraping across plates of
beans will suddenly cease.
The desert will fall eerily
silent. All eyes squint
for sayin’ them words. But it’s not, so everyone just squints in stunned
silence, genuine hurt concealed behind layers of well-honed macho exterior.
You continue.
“Now, Luke, your inexpensive used Wrangler—into which you’ve wedged a small-block and
over which you’ve slathered more diamond plate than an oil rig—will go pretty much
anywhere this H2 will. It’s a fine and versatile product with a heritage of which both you
and it can be proud, but it’s hindered by a lack of truly useful cargo capacity.
“An’ Jeb: Your Grand Cherokee has room for gear. With some aftermarket skid plate
protection it is highly capable crawlin’ on boulders and goin’ over the worst trails. But even
it lacks the extraordinary approach, departure and breakover angles this AM General/GM
vehicle can muster, not to mention the Hummer’s impressive undercarriage protection,
mondo standard tire size and ultimately even greater interior capacity.
“Hans, that Merc G500, which you still call a Gelaendewagen, offers three locking diffs. I
appreciate and respect that, but it looks like the Cold War Eastern Front patrol tank from
which it so recently descended, and costs a full 50 percent more than my H2.
differential that provides torque
to the slipping rear wheels of
your faceless, generic crossover
hybrid minivan-based SUV is
useless when it comes to a
serious four-wheel-drive
endeavor. Hell, it’s a joke is what
it is.”
Then you’d sit back in your
folding aluminum camp chair and
stare smugly into the campfire.
Your buddies would know you
were right—but would not yet
have figured out how best to
respond. The only sound would
be the campfire crackling, the
chirp of crickets and the slow,
moaning wind through the great
American West like an ancient
ghost train of yesteryear.
Then they’d all jump you and
the following: H2 is the second civilian vehicle from AM General, put together in South
Bend, Indiana, in a purpose-built plant next to the one that cranks out 1000 civilian
versions a year of the original Hummer. There are design cues on the new H2 that connect
it to its forebear: squared-off edges, near-vertical windshield, the dashboard and
instruments and that fearless, hungry-looking grille. But mechanically the H1 and H2 are as
separate as half-brothers. How is that possible?
The original Hummer was built for the military to repel a major Soviet Bloc invasion against
NATO. It did that so well the Soviets never attacked. But when military sales fell off at the
end of the Cold War, AM General looked to the civilian market to make up cash. The
civilian market was a strange new world for AM General. Civilians wanted things like
customer satisfaction, torsional stability and wind noise lower than a C-117 at takeoff.
When civilian buyers got their first taste of the H1, they were shocked by its ergonomically
hostile interior, rattly body and loudness. Yet, for a hearty 1000 buyers a year that was its
appeal.
To sell something in bigger numbers, AM General knew it would have to aim more at the
mainstream without losing the Hummerness that gave it legitimacy in the first place.
Coincidentally, at the same time General Motors wanted a way to cash in on some Hummer
cachet. So in January 1999, GM and AM General signed a “contract manufacturing
agreement” to have AM General build the H2 using lots of GM parts. A year later the team
was assembled from GM Truck and AM General personnel and 16 months after that came
our first drive in a finished H2.
“We had two objectives,” said assistant vehicle line executive Ken Lindensmith. “It had to
act like a Hummer and it had to look like a Hummer.” It does both but it does them without
the clanking military baggage of the H1. Here’s how:
The H2 starts as your basic GMT820 truck platform, the one introduced on Chevy and
GMC pickups in 1999 and now forming the basis for the Suburban, Tahoe, Yukon,
Escalade and the rest of GM’s full-size trucks and sport/utilities. The basic suspension is
also from the trucks. The H2 drivetrain consists of a Vortec 6.0-liter gasoline V8 making
316 horsepower at 5200 rpm and 360 lb-ft of torque at 4000. It’s attached to a 4L65E
four-speed automatic.
But that wouldn’t make it a Hummer; that would make it something like a boxy,
wind-resistant Escalade, which it ain’t. The H2 is not just a cosmetic rebadge of a Tahoe
dressed up to look like an Army mutant. There are several mechanical measurements and
items of hardware that make an SUV truly off-road capable and they’re all here on the H2.
Start with approach and descent
angles. With the optional airbag
rear suspension cranked up to
maximum height, the H2’s
approach angle is 41.7 degrees
and the departure angle is 41.8.
Designers chopped off eight
inches from the front of the
standard GMT820 sled and a
few more off the rear to get that
figure. It means you can ease
the H2 up against just about any
block of stone and creep right
on up it. Breakover angle at full
extension is 27.5 degrees,
meaning you can crest a much
sharper rise than you could in a
typical GM SUV and way more
than the average urban
sport/utility.
But those rocks waiting out there
in the wild American West
haven’t read the Hummer press
kit. They’re sitting out there right
now waiting to take a bite out of
any transfer case or differential
that comes along. Some rocks
even exceed the H2’s
41.7-degree approach angle
and 27.5-degree breakover
angle. For them the H2 has skid
plates, brush guards and welded
cages bolted all along its
underside from front to back like
a psychotic, welded-metal rock
weasel.
Undertray areas with items that
don’t require regular
maintenance get beefy skid
plates. Items underneath that
you might like entry to, such as
preventing rocks from ripping the vital parts to shreds. Even the seal on the rear differential
case is shingled, meaning it overlaps front to rear, so that dragging it over a rock won’t pull
it apart as easily.
While the front suspension is a torsion bar setup, which is standard fare for four-wheel
drives, the rear comes in your choice of a five-link coil spring or airbag suspension. The
airbag, called an “air spring” by GM, not only keeps the ride level regardless of load, but
can be adjusted from the driver’s seat for an extra two inches of ground clearance.
The transfer case is no viscous diff from a minivan, either. It’s a Borg-Warner 44-84 full-time
single offset unit with a low-range lock gear reduction of 2.64:1, which combined with the
4.10 final-drive, leaves you with a 33:1 crawl ratio. What does all that mean? It means that
between the case’s seven modes of operation you can forget about using the brakes on
all but the steepest downhill sections, you can crawl up a grade as steep as 60 percent
and can cruise along a paved highway without listening to gear whine and driveline bind at
about as fast a clip as the H2’s parachute-like aerodynamics will let you.
We know all this because we spent four days in Moab driving H2s. And not four days in
greater metropolitan Moab, either. Under the guidance and tutelage of AM General and
GM truck engineers, we crept, crawled and connived a caravan of them over Moab’s
infamous Poison Spider and Golden Spike trails, two of the hardest four-wheel-drive routes
on the planet.
Generally it consists of a bunch
of grown men standing around
making suggestions to one man
who is piloting some sort of
sport/ute as the sport/ute
delicately teeters on the brink of
doom, balanced on two
diagonally opposite wheels,
caught between making it over
some big rock and rolling over
onto its roof like a bug. If you roll
all the way over, you get your
picture on a website somewhere.
Pictured on this page is the H2
slithering through Golden Spike
Trail’s infamous Golden Crack. To
navigate this tortured fold of rock
means getting your rig diagonally
down into the thing, balancing on
then creeping slowly out of it, utilizing the H2’s locking differentials to keep a measured
amount of power to the wheels that are actually touching the ground. The H2 even flattens
out throttle response to provide smoother power delivery in low-range boulder crawling.
The trails also have steep steps like giant works of public art that look like they’re made of
worn red concrete.
There are long steep grinds up rubber-scarred sandstone with the windshield showing
nothing but blue sky, matched by descents so sharply downhill that when you hit the
bottom all you see through the windshield is red rock. In between are boulders off which
you slowly whang, crash and skeeeeerunch, dragging and scraping the undercarriage
repeatedly over solid rock edges with no damage worse than a few battle scars on the skid
plates to show for it. At the end of the day you drive home with all your gear stowed inside
and leave the thing at valet parking, neither of you any the worse for wear; indeed, with
you the better for it.
The first H2s arrive at the 150 H2 dealers (the top 2 percent to 3 percent of GM dealers in
the country!) in July starting at $48,800 including freight. Add leather, a huge sunroof and
the air suspension and the sticker hits $53,600. GM expects to sell 25,000 to 30,000 H2s
in the first year, adding that only 10 percent to 15 percent of them will ever go off-road.
That latter statistic is really too bad. If you buy one, get a group of your friends together,
your four-wheelin’ buddies, and head out to Moab. Then, at the end of the day you can all
sit around the campfire and talk about which SUV is the best in the world.