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Photo illustration by Slate. Photos by Getty Images Plus.
Forget the Cybertruck. The most ridiculous car in America was built for our moment—and I almost lost my mind driving it.
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Joe—my commanding officer for the day, all buzz-cut and uniform—pulled the vehicle around. It was big, all right. He had chosen this one from a fleet of 10, staged in formation, different colors, awaiting deployment. I had requested the most powerful of the bunch, and here it was: huge, imposing, rolling toward me, silent.
The sky was steely, a warmer-than-usual spring day in south Florida. The vehicle was gray—“meteorite metallic,” actually. I faced forward and watched it approach head-on. The LED headlights, less blinding in the glare of the afternoon, lit up the grill like high-octane veneers. The whole thing was almost 8 feet wide exactly and stood 6 feet, 7 inches tall. The front end, which was also a trunk, came up right to my rib cage, a contact point that would have chagrined any high school football coach as bad tackling form: too high. Two bright red tow hooks punctuated the facade.
Joe parked and climbed back down to Earth. My turn. I gripped handles on the door and the frame and pulled myself up into the driver’s seat. Despite being taller than 6 feet myself, I needed two tries to get all the way up and in. But I made it and fastened my seat belt.
And thus I had at my command a machine with not one, not two, but three separate motors, 8,500 pounds of towing capacity, 367 miles of range, massive wheels to drive on—or over—anything my heart desired. I was part human, part 9,500 pounds of steel and glass and plastic and lithium. I was behind the wheel of the biggest, meanest, greenest, most American street-legal machine in existence.
Also, it was not created by Elon Musk. A Cybertruck is a sorry substitute for what I was about to drive: a Hummer EV 3X pickup, Extreme Off-Road edition. It is the heaviest mass-market car in the world, and, being all electric, it did not have a single molecule of carbon dioxide flaring from the tailpipe.
The electric Hummer is, to look at it generously, an answer to several problems. Two are carbon emissions and American roads. In this country, we pump out more carbon per capita than anywhere else in the developed world. Also, our cars here are big—huge—each a symbol of the strength of its driver as well as a literal physical barrier for said driver that, in the unfortunate instance of a crash, people think might shield them from all the other big, huge cars on the road.
Your typical electric car will help with carbon emissions, but it is not big and huge. It’s, well, how to put this gently? It’s kind of for the gentle. Liberals. Even after Musk’s MAGA makeover, polling showed that only 20 percent of Republicans would seriously consider buying an EV, the reality of which is evident in Tesla’s subsequent sales plummet.
That’s the other problem these vehicles purport to solve: EVs are not for red-blooded unapologetic American men. But the hulking electric Hummer is for men.
In that way, it is a beautiful tragedy. For one thing, not many American men know that it exists. For another, it may cease to exist before too long. But not before I drove it and got my own taste of American power unlimited. And where better to drive it than in south Florida, on the low-lying front lines of our national clash with the rising seas and the warming climate and some of the most dangerous roadways in the country?
In the driver’s seat, I turned on the windshield wipers, and three arms scaped dust from the outside glass. I must have hesitated, because Joe, the sales representative, became my hype man: “Let’s do it,” he said. Time to save the Earth like a goddamn man.
In Florida, I saw not only my life but also the past few decades of the American experiment flash in front of me. And I rolled right over all of it.
As the Cold War wound down in the 1980s and left behind only an American superpower, AM General Corporation—a vehicle manufacturer in Indiana that had been making carriers for the Postal Service—struck a deal with the federal government to make 55,000 Humvees. The product was meant to roll on and over anything in its path, transporting personnel in all-terrain combat zones: a bigger, badder, wider Jeep.
Other than Saddam Hussein, it turned out to be the breakout star of the first Gulf War. It photographed handsomely in Operation Desert Storm, cruising unbothered around apocalyptic Kuwait, black smoke pouring from its oil derricks, in a triumphant, made-for-TV U.S. campaign.
That vehicle caught the eye of Arnold Schwarzenegger, on location in Oregon filming Kindergarten Cop, a movie in which his character goes undercover as a schoolteacher to find a missing witness to drug crimes. Schwarzenegger loved it, the Humvee, and petitioned AM General to make him a fleet for civilian use. The company thought that that war, generally speaking, couldn’t go on forever (whoops), and its Postal Service deal was running out. So it saw an opportunity—and hooked him up. With Arnie as ambassador, AM General decided to bring the Hummer home.
In 1992 the H1, a cult icon and a military-grade gas-guzzler, began selling domestically. It weighed 6,766 pounds, went zero to 60 in 18.1 seconds, and got between 7 and 9 mpg. The war that had birthed it was a war about oil. That war did end in short order: Roughly 25,000 Iraqi soldiers killed, along with about 100,000 Iraqi civilians, but it ended. What better legacy of our first dustup with Saddam Hussein, our first President Bush, than this hulking machine.
This was a man’s car, no doubt about that. Despite a very limited run, it sold well enough to catch the eye of the big dogs at General Motors. In 1999 the company entered into a licensing and production deal with AM General. “They went on this huge expansion, signed up a bunch of dealers, and even built their own dealerships,” said Marty Padgett, author of Hummer: How a Little Truck Company Hit the Big Time, Thanks to Saddam, Schwarzenegger, and GM. It wasn’t just a car anymore; it was a whole brand. Soon enough, it was a mainstay of blockbuster films like Bad Boys and The Rock, rolling over sidewalk fruit vendors and Volkswagen Beetles, a shorthand for American masculinity.
The same year GM bought Hummer, it called off production on another oddball vehicle: the EV1. It was an all-electric coupe the company trialed only in the Southwest. It didn’t matter that the EV1 also had a cult following and macho celebrity enthusiast, Mel Gibson. GM said it was unprofitable; indeed, the oil industry and other car manufacturers paid for ads and funded political pressure campaigns against it. Elon Musk once said that if GM hadn’t killed the EV1, there would have been no need for Tesla. Oh, well: The EV1 was out, and the Hummer was in.
In 2002, right after our invasion of Afghanistan and just before we got back to Iraq, GM announced the release of the Hummer H2. Perfect timing. It weighed 6,500 pounds, went zero to 60 in 10 seconds, and got between 9 and 10.8 mpg, depending. We had our second George Bush as president, and our second Gulf War was about to kick into high gear, this one dubbed the “war on terror.” It was a great civilizational contest, according to the Bush administration.
But it too was obviously also about oil. “Of course it’s about oil; we can’t really deny that,” said Gen. John Abizaid, former head of U.S. Central Command and military operations in Iraq, in 2007. “I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil,” wrote former Federal Reserve Chair Alan Greenspan in his memoir. “People say we’re not fighting for oil. Of course we are,” said former Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel. Just three men’s opinions.
Another oil war was great news for GM’s flagship gas-guzzler. “Hummer dealers say the war in Iraq has increased showroom traffic,” the New York Times reported in 2003. GM went full speed ahead, pouring money into national ad campaigns assailing things like men eating tofu.
Soon enough, the famed chariot was terrorizing American suburbs, thrashing roads and smashing the carbon budget with its iconic, super-high front end, a most patriotic consumer symbol. That year, the year we returned to Iraq, climate scientists wailed before the Senate in a hearing called “The Case for Climate Change Action,” which elicited this response from Republican John McCain: “No excuse for inaction on this issue is acceptable.” But the incentives were pointing in the exact opposite direction: Trucks over 6,000 pounds were eligible for substantial tax write-offs, which meant that the H2 was not just climate contemptuous; it was also being partly subsidized by the feds, a tax-advantaged show of support for a war we were on our way to losing.
It took a few years for things to go really bad. GM got overextended, not unlike the United States. Belief in our civilizational war with “terror” plummeted; an estimated 600,000 more Iraqi civilians died. Meanwhile, GM’s excessive Hummer build-out helped drag it into bankruptcy. Gas prices soared, and Hummer turned out not to be so profitable in the end. In 2009, as part of those bankruptcy proceedings, GM attempted to dump Hummer in a sale to Sichuan Tengzhong Heavy Industrial Machinery Company, a deal that was scotched by Chinese regulators. In 2010, the brand was discontinued.
It was the turn of the decade: recession time, President Obama, a more shamefaced chapter of the never-ending war on terrorism. The Toyota Prius reigned supreme. Men ate tofu—that was OK after all. Goodbye to “just about the dumbest car in the world,” eulogized Vanity Fair, “the ultimate fuck-you to the environment,” a celebration of “war and global warming.” Straight to the dustbin of history, one of many macho mistakes in a decade full of them.
That should have been the end of the Hummer, scourge of the climate and the auto industry, shameful reminder of the unjustifiable war. But as the 2010s came to a close, there was a twist fit for our American moment.
Joe and I were rolling down Federal Highway, headed north, past palm trees and spring breakers, my body now comfortable sitting in a plush driver’s seat that would have taken a full row on a budget airplane.
Few places are more squarely on the American front lines of climate change than here in Pompano Beach, on the Atlantic coast, north of Fort Lauderdale. Most of it is extremely low-lying and perforated by tidal canals. Flooding is already somewhat commonplace, even when there aren’t hurricanes (and there are hurricanes). The American Flood Coalition has determined that it is “highly vulnerable to sea Ievel rise,” which is coming, faster and more furious, than we thought. NASA just found that in 2024, the global sea level rose far more than expected. I had landed here for my fateful drive because of its climate salience, as well as its award-winning Hummer dealership, Sheehan Buick GMC.
Our route had us tracking ever closer to what will soon be the highest point in south Florida: the Monarch Hill Renewable Energy Park. That’s a bit of a misnomer. What was once a waste-to-energy plant is now simply a landfill. They recently tore down the generator to make room for more trash, which is why it is perhaps better known by its colloquial name, Mount Trashmore.
Not unlike the nearby sea, the level of waste at Mount Trashmore had been rising more quickly than anticipated. Direct hits from supercharged hurricanes yielded lots of debris; 2017’s Hurricane Irma brought half a million tons of storm detritus to the mount. Just a few days prior to my arrival, the City Council voted to expand it substantially: Its new projected height is 320 feet, 100 feet taller than where it crests currently. That will make it south Florida’s highest peak, the third-tallest point in the state. With that pesky energy generator out of the way, the landfill can keep taking trash until 2036.
We pulled up to a red light. On a clearer day, Mount Trashmore, just a few miles inland, might have been visible. But it was hazy, and the dealership spec sheet—showcasing a price tag, $136,000—was blocking the window. So far, our deployment had been unspectacular: I had driven straight, at civilian speeds, while Joe walked me through some basic features on the gigantic laptop screen in the center of the dashboard. Google Maps, Hulu, various proprietary American technologies for entertainment.
Enough pussyfooting around. I asked Joe if we could enable “Watts to Freedom” mode, and he said yes.
Watts to Freedom is a full-power mode unique to the Hummer EV. It is designed for “closed courses during optimal driving conditions,” where you can accelerate in dramatic fashion. It is the most Hummer a man can attain.
Stationary at the intersection, I stood on the brake pedal while Joe mashed buttons on the console. “Vehicle lowering,” the dashboard read.
The truck began to crouch in its stance, sinking toward the ground. “Lowering,” it said. Its avatar was replaced with a g-force meter. The words Watts to Freedom flashed on the right side. WTF mode was engaged; we were ready for launch.
The seat beneath me began to vibrate, as though I were in a 4D movie.
“So I just floor it?” I asked Joe.
“Not yet,” he cautioned me.
The words Floor it flashed on the dashboard.
“It’s telling me to floor it,” I said.
“You can’t yet,” said Joe, who was perhaps concerned that I was going to run the red light, which was a valid concern, because I actually couldn’t see the light without craning my neck, blocked as it was by the top bar of the car’s massive frame, one of the vehicle’s prodigious blind spots. A rumble came in over the speakers. Joe tried to explain the sound, but I couldn’t hear him, because the car in the lane next to me had moved, meaning green, and I was already pedal down.
We blasted forward.
“Why an SUV needs to get zero to 60 under three seconds is a question with no answer,” David Zipper, a senior fellow at the MIT Mobility Initiative, later told me.
Well, that’s one man’s opinion. It felt like the free-fall drop on a roller coaster, somehow more intense than anything at Six Flags. It felt as if my eyelids had been left, Looney Tunes–style, at the intersection. The g-force counter must have surged, but I don’t know for sure because I couldn’t even focus my vision as the floodwaters of adrenaline rose and receded in my brain. I stammered inane commentary as my eyes tried to refocus. Insane, I whooped.
I braked. Slowing down is part of driving. Here’s Car and Driver magazine on the Hummer EV’s capacity for abatement: “Slowing the massive machine to a stop from 70 mph took an extra-long 211 feet, and repeated runs resulted in noticeable brake fade. Yikes.” I got it to a standstill before the oncoming intersection. “We can take a right up here,” Joe said, and we turned off the highway and into a residential neighborhood, toward the advancing seas.
I tried to regain some composure. I was hoping to establish a little more rapport: two men on the open road and all that. Joe asked me where I lived. New York City, I said. He asked, “You’re not afraid of getting killed up there?”
U.S. roads are extremely deadly. In 2021 road fatalities were the second-leading cause of death among Americans younger than 45, ahead of COVID and suicides and gun violence and certainly ahead of whatever nightmarish city occurrences Joe was imagining. Americans blow away every other rich country in the world in terms of likeliness to get splattered on the asphalt. The highway is, if you will, a killing field. And Pompano Beach had the dubious distinction of leading the nation in the number of pedestrian traffic fatalities in 2021: 8.9 pedestrians killed in vehicle accidents per 100,000 residents.
Nationally, pedestrians and drivers alike are dying at a record clip. The fact that drivers are so at risk is sort of incredible, because cars have never been safer. “The structure, the airbags, the restraint systems: If you would’ve told me 20 years ago some of these safety things on vehicles now would be standard, I would’ve thought you were crazy,” said Raul Arbelaez, vice president of the Vehicle Research Center at the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety. “Vehicles are performing so, so well. They’re safer than ever.”
And yet, added Arbelaez, “fatality trends have gone in the wrong direction.”
In the 1990s, as the original Hummer rolled onto the scene, cars started getting big and bigger still. This trend is often blamed on an ineffable consumer preference, or Americans’ being fat, but that isn’t exactly true. Manufacturers enjoy much higher profit margins on SUVs, and so rushed to make more of them. Heavier cars were exempted from national fuel economy standards and were eligible for major tax write-offs, lighter regulatory treatment that smaller cars did not enjoy. “In effect, we legislated compact sedans out of existence,” said Padgett, the author of the Hummer book. Now 4 in 5 new cars purchased are trucks or SUVs.
Those big cars made the people inside them much safer and the people in the smaller ones, or not in cars at all, way, way less safe. Big is secure, which is a nice visceral sentiment to convey in ads—protect your own! In psychology, what has happened with car size is known as the prisoner’s dilemma. Shoot or risk being shot. An arms race broke out, and American roads became a war zone.
The Economist did a giant study on this, plotting millions of American crashes on a graph. “For every life that the heaviest 1 percent of SUVs and trucks save, there are more than a dozen lives lost in other vehicles,” it found. (That graph’s x-axis tops out at 7,000 pounds, an easy 2,500 pounds shy of the electric Hummer.)
In a crash between two vehicles, extra weight is immediately more deadly, the magazine found. “Getting hit by an additional 1,000 lbs of steel and aluminum—roughly the difference between a Toyota Camry and a Ford Explorer—boosts the likelihood of death by 66 percent.” A Toyota Camry, by the way, weighs 3,000 pounds. That is about the weight of just the battery in the Hummer EV.
Here’s the conclusion of the study: “If the heaviest tenth of vehicles in America’s fleet were downsized to this lighter weight class, road fatalities in multi-car crashes—which totaled 19,081 in 2023—could be reduced by 12 percent, or 2,300, without sacrificing the safety of any cars involved.” In plainest English: If the people with the heaviest vehicles made do with slightly less, the impact to the safety of their lives would be literally zero, and thousands fewer people would die.
So here’s what we’re doing instead: The average new car in America now weighs more than 4,400 pounds. (That figure is 3,300 pounds in Europe, and just 2,600 pounds in Japan.) In 2023 vehicles weighing more than 5,000 pounds accounted for almost a third of new cars, up from 22 percent as recently as 2018. The 2020s have yet to see a year when fewer than 40,000 Americans die in traffic accidents, according to an analysis from the National Safety Council, a nonprofit group.
This was the world the Hummer made, and by late 2020, GM brought the brand back from the dead. The automaker announced the all-electric revival just a few days before Joe Biden’s election night triumph.
The first time Arbelaez, of the IIHS, saw the electric Hummer, it was in a Super Bowl ad. “Oh man,” he worried to himself, “that thing is gonna be huge.”
Oh, and it was.
Later on, Joe and I were cruising down two-lane roads. We passed verdant lawns, well maintained. We passed a water feature. We passed residential streets, most without sidewalks. We passed multiple radar speed signs, declaiming mph numbers, beseeching drivers to slow down. I crept through roundabouts. I slowed to a near halt at numerous speed bumps, little waves passing under us, barely there. “You don’t need to stop for those,” Joe told me.
Joe Biden did the most to fight climate change of any American president. He took it seriously, deeming it an “existential threat,” even considered declaring a national emergency. He invoked literal wartime powers, the Defense Authorization Act, on behalf of making things like heat pumps. This was the first U.S. presidency to treat climate change like the civilizational conflict that scientists have long said it is.
And when the Biden administration set out to make its climate policy, especially for transit, it focused squarely on electric vehicles. There were lots of advantages to this approach. Transportation is the country’s largest source of greenhouse gases. Americans drive, and Americans make cars; car culture is American culture. It wasn’t even just about climate: Making electric vehicles was a core part of the industrial policy strategy, reshoring American manufacturing and raising American wages. It tripled as foreign policy, giving us a strategic benefit in our great power contest with China, which is churning out EVs with global designs. “The Biden admin effectively decided that EVs were good. End of story, full stop,” said Zipper, the senior fellow at MIT.
These were great aspirations. Biden wanted a better climate—but, really, he wanted it all.
He and his administration wanted American manufacturing. They wanted electric. They wanted it to be union-built. They didn’t care if the resulting offering was expensive, up to a certain point, because they were going to subsidize the price, and they seemed, actually, to prefer big: SUVs and trucks priced up to $80,000 qualified for a $7,500 tax credit; sedans and hatchbacks qualified only up to $55,000. The administration was not interested in tangling with powerful trends that had been going on for decades. It wanted to meet Americans where they were at. Which was riding high in their gigantic cars.
The electric Hummer is electric. It is made in America, in Detroit, in the swing state of Michigan. It is union made, UAW. Check, check, check. It is expensive, too expensive—by and large, to qualify for the regular deduction—but the dealerships figured out a loophole to tap into that money anyway via leasing agreement. American ingenuity knows no bounds.
For the electric Hummer’s rollout, people thought outside the box. In the absence of a well-timed real-life ground invasion to help boost sales, they paid Activision to feature the Hummer EV as a transportation option in Call of Duty: Warzone 2.0, a move that immediately made an impression: “It hasn’t taken players long to highlight another one of its attributes: Using its massive, hulking frame to run pedestrians over,” Vice noted.
Biden was positively giddy about the Hummer EV. In November 2021, he went to Detroit and took the electric Hummer pickup truck for a joyride. He brought one down to the White House. According to a press release from GM, that free advertising for the truck shot preorders of the vehicle up seven times, and visits to the website skied 230 percent. The Department of Transportation took time out from decrying roadway safety issues, a concern that Secretary Pete Buttigieg said was his department’s top priority, to feature the 5-ton Hummer EV at an electrification showcase at department HQ.
“There was this refusal to acknowledge what was patently obvious to even someone who just looks at this thing: I don’t think this is a societally valuable way to travel,” Zipper said.
Well, sure, easy for someone who’s on the wrong end of it to say. Not me, though. The second time I got behind the wheel of the electric Hummer, my second 15-minute deployment with Joe, I wasn’t fazed by getting up into the driver’s seat. I wasn’t fazed by the lack of visibility cruising down Federal Highway. This time, I was in a Hummer EV SUV, the more popular model. No more flatbed, which Joe conceded was mostly pointless with the bulky spare tire filling it up. But it was as big as ever and just as tall, a military-grade transport vehicle for retrieving toddlers from preschool. This time, it was a more appropriate Army green.
I was hyped. I punched it straight off the lot, this Hummer with only two motors and only 570 horsepower, which didn’t matter much, because traffic was a knot and we could barely move. I was sensing a lack of enthusiasm in Joe. I continued to issue vacuous appeals about how cool and sick and insane this was. Joe eventually obliged with a tepid agreement: “pretty badass.”
A Kia Soul cut in front of me, exiting a Jiffy Lube. This was a fellow SUV, substantially sized compared to the coupes of 30 years ago, but diminutive compared to me. I looked down. Cut me off? In this car?! I couldn’t believe it. Some people act as if there are no consequences.
Cooler heads prevailed. Finally, we got out of traffic and back into the residential neighborhood. This time, I took Joe’s advice to heart. We came upon a roundabout, and I didn’t falter for a second, didn’t ease my foot off the accelerator once. I smoked every speed bump we came across, no slowing, and barely felt them.
Sick, awesome, amazing, I continued to prattle on. I marveled at a totally useless feature that allowed me to brake via a steering wheel–mounted paddle shifter, like a trigger on a PlayStation controller. A speed detector flashed 25 at us; I must have been going faster this time. But I wasn’t interested in hearing from detractors. No more apologizing: This, finally, was limitless American power.
We hit a short residential straightaway, I gave it some more juice, and there at last, we were headed for a Tesla Cybertruck. They’d been circulating in the south Florida traffic; this was the first time we’d come face-to-face. It barreled down on us in a cherry-red body wrap, filling up the adjacent lane. I eyeballed it quickly and felt sure: We were higher up, had more torque, more horsepower, and more weight. Our lane was barely wide enough to contain us: We could have run it off the road, no problem.
I was hoping Joe would feel some similarly competitive outrage toward the rolling trapezoid, deficient in Americana, ignorant of history, nothing like the estimable Hummer. But no. At least on the inside, he told me, “they’re pretty badass.”
OK—well, maybe you will indulge me in a little shit talk about the Cybertruck. If there’s a four-wheeled icon of this new era of excess, a true spiritual inheritor to the 2000s’ Hummer H2, the boxy, antisocial, Minecraft-looking mastodon that is the Cybertruck might have a better claim to that title even than the Hummer EV, its sharp-angled profile and blinding LEDs even more antisocial. Musk once said he was going to focus on building a little $25,000 electric car. Then he built that thing, with an MSRP starting at $72,000 and climbing well into the six digits, a price tag that did not include glue that works.
Musk’s rollout of that rough beast coincided with his foray into American government. There, he launched a one-man war with federal spending, which also ended in defeat. Musk “saved” almost nothing but succeeded in delivering massive civilian casualties—300,000, according to one estimate, mostly children—in his destruction of the U.S. Agency for International Development. Quick work for the world’s richest man.
The Cybertruck has become a cipher for this injustice. The whole billionaire-enrichment-and-public-impoverishment project of Trump 2 has Cybertruck as its rolling proxy. And so this is where people are registering displeasure: via eggs on the windshield or wax on the door panels or rocks all over. Sometimes they’ve been burned. No one is buying them.
Those fighting against the defunding of scientific institutions and regulatory agencies, against the repeal of much of the country’s environmental laws, against the objectively pro-pollution Big Oil agenda of the Trump administration, are doing so via guerrilla tactics against one giant electric truck. Which maybe would have been fine if not for the fact that the alternative—the triumph of Biden’s climate policy, the EV Hummer—was purpose-built not to appeal to liberals either.
Not long ago, a whole Tesla dealership lot went up in flames. That that happened in France didn’t seem to matter. Other at-home anti-Tesla vigilantism followed. Trump, dusting off an old, familiar phrase, announced that violence against Tesla dealerships would be labeled “domestic terrorism.” Perpetrators, he said, will “go through hell.”
It should all sound faintly familiar, because the last time we were getting hot about domestic terrorism, it also involved large cars.
In late 2003, a Southern California Hummer dealership went up in flames, perhaps the highest-profile act of ecoterrorism in the whole furious smelt of American history: twenty Hummer H2s blackened and singed, along with a smattering of other SUVs, courtesy of the Earth Liberation Front, a militant environmentalist group that took issue with the gas-guzzlers’ impact on the climate, which was basically only lukewarm compared with the present day. The ELF struck again in 2004, breaking windows, slashing tires, and spray-painting five Hummers in Arkansas. The group picked off another solitary Hummer in Spokane, Washington.
The FBI was panicked. Already, the bureau had declared to Congress that ecoterrorism, with its casualty count of zero, outranked Islamic anything as its highest domestic-terrorism priority. So the federal government went to work pursuing ELF members with alacrity, heaping sentence-lengthening terrorism enhancements on members to the point that, by 2006, the group basically ceased to exist. Now even the most radical environmental protests have a softer touch: In 2022 Gen Z climate activists began letting the air out of the tires of gas-guzzling SUVs.
In any case, we edged by the Cybertruck without issue, without snarl, and out of the neighborhood. We sat at a red light, waiting to turn right back onto the highway. “You can really open it up coming out of here,” Joe told me. In dangerous New York City, you’re not even allowed to turn right on red. I rolled through the light and floored it once more.
Listen to the author speak about this story on What Next, Slate’s daily news podcast:
Back at the dealership one last time, I met Joe, who came out and retrieved me. I was sitting in the Hummer parked on the lot, racing through its bounteous features. At one point, the car offered to deflate its own tires, not an act of self-sabotage but a premium feature for off-roading in sand.
We took a seat at his desk inside. On the back wall was mounted the redesigned logo: the same brand name in all caps—HUMMER—but with a slender EV appendage
When they first started selling the Hummers to those eager early buyers, he told me, the dealership called them down for a celebratory handoff. “We made a big event out of it,” he said. Not anymore.
Still, “we are selling 10 or 12 a month here,” Joe told me. In Q1 of this year, 3,479 Hummer EVs were delivered, not exactly big figures, but 109 percent more than a year ago. Was this actually working? Were we saving the Earth?
But for a car so big and so fast, those numbers were way too small and too slow. Already, the Earth has barreled through 1.5 degrees of warming; the Paris climate accords, which the U.S. has now exited for a second time, were signed just a decade ago to prevent that number from being exceeded for all time. Per the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, CO2 is “accumulating in the atmosphere faster than ever.”
Meanwhile, this projection of American military and manufacturing might was getting routed abroad. Rather than being run over by the great Hummer, much of the world is being overrun by Chinese craft, electric vehicles built by BYD. The company just released its own signature model in Europe, the Dolphin Surf, which is tiny, costs $20,000, and weighs less than 3,000 pounds. (It goes zero to 60 in 11 seconds.) BYD is already outselling Tesla there. It’s a similar story in Latin America. Thankfully, we here are protected from Chinese takeover: by tariffs, by law, and by law of the jungle. In January, the U.S. banned Chinese-made smart car software and hardware. Those little cars, on our roads: They would never survive.
“The Hummer initially was sort of that flag to plant, that symbol of American superiority,” Padgett told me. “Now we’re just looking for a symbol of American relevance.”
Maybe expectations were too high. This large, loud something was surely better than nothing. But then the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy, a nonprofit group, did the math and found out that the Hummer EV is so big, so energy intensive, that it is actually somehow worse on a carbon-dioxide emissions level than the gas-powered Chevy Malibu. The Malibu creates over 320 grams of CO2 per mile, on account of burning gasoline. But when accounting for emissions from the electrical grid—as in, taking into account the emissions created in generating the electricity, based on the national average of energy grid generation—the Hummer EV results in 341 grams of carbon pollution per mile. The zero-emissions Hummer EV is worse on a carbon-emissions level than the world’s least-spectacular gas-powered sedan. A technological marvel.
Now Republicans are fast at work repealing the bulk of the climate policy Biden passed. The retreat is on. The United States is the largest oil producer on the planet, and the president wants more, plus more gas, plus more coal. The rest of the world is leaving us behind, which would be the silver lining of this story if we weren’t also dragging the entire planet down with us. We brought the war home, only to lose it there too. And with our great battle against climate change headed toward total loss, we are now returning our efforts to a more familiar loser, an illicit war with a major oil producer in the Middle East.
I shook hands with Joe, firm embrace, and thanked him. “I think you’re gonna buy one,” he said.
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