If you are considering a Hummer…, originally uploaded by cSc – formerly Paint with light.

As part of the downsizing announcement this week, General Motors stated that they intend to do a “strategic review” of the Hummer Brand. A strategic review of course means selling the brand because like Ford, they have no money to invest in marginal niche products.

There is how ever little tears shed over the potential loss of this largely impractical vehicle even from the state of Texas:

If that happens to the Hummer, good. The Schwarzeneggerian contraptions, civilian versions of the U.S. military’s Humvees, are rolling period pieces, antiques from a day and age when nothing succeeded like excess. When the first Hummers hit the highways in the 1990s, gasoline was exceptionally cheap, adjusted for inflation. Hummers, boxy heavyweights whose in-city mileage numbers approximated the age of a seventh-grader, were an affordable way to indulge in conspicuous consumption.

From the tree hugging North West’s Seattle:

Getting the boot from GM would be quite the comedown for a brand that, only two summers ago, had a deal with McDonald’s to hand out toy models of its product with Happy Meals. Americans’ willingness to buy Hummers was always a stunner, a literal spit in the eye to common sense and Mother Earth. But Hummer buyers, macho posing aside, hardly stand alone. They were enabled by weak U.S. auto mileage requirements, the absurdly cheap cost of gasoline in a country with minimal gas taxes and short-term corporate thinking.

The Hummer indeed has a particular place in vehicle lore because it is largely an impractical car, a poster boy of excess and cheap gas.

Like the last Bush administration, the Hummer will be rendered to a largely irrelevant history, a small corner in some village museum where children will be asked if they remember President Benjamin Harrison, George Walker Bush or the Hummer SUV.

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