Indeed. There are plenty of better and cheaper big-ass trucks. Even the Tahoe the H2 is based on.
The non-HMMV Hummers are… well, fool’s choices, IMHO.
The HMMV Hummer is an exceedingly capable vehicle with nasty drawbacks, especially at highway speeds. There are certainly reasons to own it, but… unless I had need of the capabilites, I wouldn’t buy it. Too limiting.
In that case, I admire your dedication to promoting alternative energy sources; how much dick size did it cost to get your truck running on vegetable oil?
I kid, I kid. That’s actually pretty cool. Was that you at the College of Charleston on Earth Day last year?
heehee. Given that Bob treats Republicans the way he is convinced Republicans treat kittens, I’m gonna take a wild stab at it and guess “negative”.
P J O’Rourke on the Humvee: “In the first place, it was developed for those notorious militarists, the military…{it} is one of those overconceived and underconsidered Pentagon whatchamajigs. It’s two-thirds muddle and three-fourths boondoggle and largely incapable of doing anything that couldn’t be done by a four-wheel-drive Toyota pickup with a .50 caliber machine gun mounted on the roof.”
Any farmer worth the name is going to have a pick-up, not an SUV. (Ever see an SUV get loaded via a backhoe at the local Seed & Feed? Didn’t think so). The farming community where I was for a few years was often still using the 1950’s vintage Ford pick-up trucks. The only Hummers in evidence were driven by soccer moms from the intruding suburbs.
Wink.
So a farmer could use a military-derived vehicle for farming if he wanted to. (Although there’s a slight price difference between a Hummer and the vehicle pictured. 
)
My previous point stands: let’s see that vehicle get 6 special forces guys, 6 rucksacks, a TOW launcher and missile pack and some other goodies across 100 miles of open terrain.
That doesn’t make sense. If you have more people then you have more mass to move around. That takes more fuel.
:dubious: I’m not so sure that’s a reliable source… anyway, I don’t see a machine gun on the roof, now, do I?
It probably takes less fuel to have one plane carry 200 people than to have two planes carry 100 each, though.
You’re right, of course. “Bongo News” is a satire site (and a pretty weak one). But their quote from the Toyota spokesman was real. Here’s the New York Times article from November, 2001 where it originated. I chose the Bongo News article because it had a picture.
O’Rourke’s point, which you refuted, was that the Hummer was badly designed from the beginning to do a job which any number of off-the-shelf automobiles could have done. The fact is that the Taliban used Toyota trucks for exactly that purpose for years.
Of course, they also lost.
That may have something to do with that whole losing thing. That and air support.
But, kidding aside, I do think the Hummer was an overdesigned boondoggle. IANAAutomobile Designer, but contrast the simplicity of the old Jeep with the behemoth that is the Hummer.
There’s a metaphor in there, somewhere.
I guess that with the dearth of unwrecked old Firebird/Camaros and the fact that mobile home prices, too, have skyrocketed in today’s real estate market, Bubba has to have something else to waste his home equity on.
Maybe the H3 wasn’t such a bad marketing ploy after all.
Perhaps it’s a response to the epidemic of obesity sweeping the nation? :dubious:
I’m still trying to figure out how flying first class burns more fuel. The number of first class seats in a plane is sort of a fixed number.
Sort of? No, it’s a reponse to the market. If no one bought first class, there wouldn’t be a first class section.
You’d have to figure it in seat-miles per gallon. And you’d have to factor in that there are more people flying coach than First Class. I’ll let a jet jockey figure it out.
But let’s look at a simple example. Say a Cessna 172 burns ten gph and flies at 120 knots*. A single pilot would consume ten gallons for his one-hour trip. A single passenger plus the pilot would each consume five gallons. Four passengers would consume 2½ gallons each on the trip. The airplane burns the same amount of fuel whether one person flies, or four do. But the cost in gallons of fuel burned goes down the more people who fly.
An airliner having 250 occupied seats will have an average seat-mile per gallon, regardless of whether the seat is First Class or Coach. You can figure out how many more Coach seats will if if First Class were removed, and use that to figure out much ‘less efficient’ First Class seats are. But I need to get out of here soon, so I’ll leave it to the jet jockeys as I said. But given the greater number of Coach seats, I can’t see First Class ‘burning 66% more fuel’. I’ll have to be shown.
[sub]*These are rough figures. I could look up the actual figures, but I’m not going to. An airplane burns more fuel on climb-out than in cruise or descent. More fuel is burned with heavier payloads. Figures are for a rough ‘thumbnail’ only.[/sub]
I’m definitely a “buy/lease and drive what you like person,” but that doesn’t mean I can’t laugh at people that drive ulgy-ass H2’s! Kind of for the same reason I laught at people that drive ugly-ass PT cruisers.
For the record, a HMMWV is a “high mobility, multi-wheeled vehicle” – a specific military vehicle of several varietys. It’s pronounced “humvee.” Of course from that, we get “Hummer.” I’ve driven many of these over the span of many years, in places that might frighten you. There’s nothing – nothing – that has ever come as close in its ability to get around off road. Well, I’ve never driven an H1…
…which is basically a civilian HMMWV. Some nice things to make it comfy, but mostly the same vehicle. Probably can’t take it in as deep water, but I don’t know know that for a fact.
The H2 is a Tahoe/Suburban chassis thing with a that ugly H2 body on it. Quality wise, the drivetrain is good. GM trucks are generally good. As for all the crap that’s glued to it, well, others seem to speak for their lack of quality.
Stop bitching about SUV’s being dangerous to you. THEY’RE NOT DANGEROUS to you. The asshole DRIVER is dangerous to you, and only if he hits you. I have an Expedition that I don’t use a whole lot. I’ll tell you, I’ll NEVER be at fault in an accident – I know how to drive, and when I’m in that beast, I’m really, really calm. If you hit me in your little econobox and it’s your fault, then who the fuck are you to complain about my SUV? I’m a BIGGER danger to you driving my little Continental because I tend to drive it faster and I lose patience with bad drivers easier. Still, I’ll never be at fault.
Like these Somalian “technicals”, you mean? {Scroll about a third of the way down to pictures 4 and 5} And we all remember what a military success Somalia, in which the US forces were equipped with Humvees was, don’t we?
