- In the coming days, you are gonna hear a lot of chatter
about the beast behind me.
See that thing is the new 2023 GMC Hummer EV,
and you're gonna hear a lot of people online
talking about how it's too heavy, or it's too big,
or it's too over the top, or it's too excessive,
or it's too crazy.
And all those people I think,
are missing the point of what this thing is.
You see, over the next few years,
General Motors is going to be introducing
a new electric vehicle architecture called Ultium.
And it means new batteries.
It means new motors.
It means new high tech controllers.
It means new platforms.
And this technology is going to underpin quite a lot
of the new General Motors lineup over the next few years.
Well, to introduce the new Ultium platform,
GM decided, you know what?
We're gonna take all the crazy technology,
throw it all into one vehicle,
and release it to the public
and see who might actually want one.
And that is what has happened here.
This is a technological flagship for General Motors'
new electric vehicle architecture.
And it is absolutely incredible
to drive both on-road and off-road.
(upbeat rock music)
So, first of all, how can this actually be a Hummer?
Didn't the Hummer brand go away over a decade ago?
Yes, it did.
This is actually a GMC Hummer EV.
It's gonna be sold through GMC dealerships,
but the whole Hummer motif was very popular in its day.
And so they've kind of brought it back
in terms of its styling and the interior theme
and the general overall look of the vehicle.
And it looks very much like a Hummer would look
if the brand had continued from when GM actually went
into bankruptcy and discontinued the thing.
Look at the front end.
That is pure Hummer.
And not just because it says Hummer across the front.
That whole front fascia, all of these are LED lights.
And when you plug it to charge it,
you'll actually see little progress bars floating past
as it charges the vehicle and tells you it's actual status.
Now the front of the vehicle
obviously has a very aggressive approach angle,
which is why you've got so much room
on the sides of bumpers.
But as you progress down the side,
you'll notice something very interesting.
Look at what the front and rear wheels are doing.
Are they broken?
No, they're not broken.
Four wheel steering comes on this Edition 1 model,
and it is really extraordinary.
It takes a vehicle that is basically
the size and weight of an HD pickup
and turns it into something far more nimble,
both on and off-road.
The turning circle for this thing is incredibly tight,
and that makes it very maneuverable,
both out on the street and on the trail.
(upbeat rock music)
(chuckling)
It's just amazing.
(laughing)
As good as the Hummer EV is on-road,
it really is meant to be an off-road machine, however.
That four wheel steering in particular
is really what makes it shine.
I mean, there are some things working
against the Hummer EV.
It is very wide.
It is very heavy, and it is very long.
And that combination of things really doesn't make
for a great off-road vehicle sometimes.
However, in this situation,
given all the extra technology that this thing has,
whether it's four wheel steering
with the crab walkabilities,
with a billion different cameras
to actually see front, behind, left, right,
underneath the vehicle.
It's got so much tech to help you go off-road,
even an adaptive air suspension, which I won't say
smooths out the ride that much, clearly.
There's only so much that technology can do,
but it does work very well.
Faster you go, the more it does actually smooth out.
That's good to know.
You can really feel the active air suspension working
at higher speeds over these desert washes.
It does smooth things out,
but you do hear this roof a heck of a lot more.
It's not quite Raptor level isolation, but it is very good.
The nice thing about this vehicle though,
is that it does does not need a dust filter for the engine
or an air snorkel for the engine,
'cause it does not have an engine.
(chuckling)
Now, one detriment on this whole width of the vehicle
is that sometimes in certain parts of the trail,
you're gonna get some Arizona pin stripes
as you come across bushes that frankly hang out
over the actual trail itself.
So if you value your paint job,
find somewhere that's got great big, open areas
and maybe not cactus that are directly next to
the side of the trail.
There are two different electronic modes
that you can use in your Hummer EV.
One is off-road mode,
which is a slightly higher speed mode,
meant for doing things like faster washes
like we're doing now.
And it does affect both the front and rear steering.
It does change the angle,
but the terrain mode is the one that you'd use
as a kind of rock crawl mode.
Things do slow down a little bit,
but you have such greater, finer control.
And you can either leave it in D for an ascent like this,
which is just fine.
It has exceptional grip, even on super loose,
sandy surfaces like this, but when you want to descend,
put it in L, and that's basically your hill descent control
using a combination of both aggressive re-gen
and the front friction breaks.
It's almost a little too aggressive in my opinion.
As soon as you lift off of the throttle with it in L,
it really does stop you rather quickly.
A little too quickly.
In addition to all of the off-road technical content
and abilities that the vehicle has
in terms of its power train and the four wheel steering,
the interior is really also a next level step up.
Just in terms of the graphics and the information
that they provide for you.
Look at these displays.
I mean, the graphics and multimedia system
were designed by Unreal Engine.
Those are the people that make "Fortnite"
and a bunch of other video games that people a lot younger
and more knowledgeable than myself actually play,
but I can recognize cool when I see it.
And just the amount of information that it provides to you
and the way it provides to you,
this is spaceship level stuff.
And spaceship's not far off.
The whole Edition 1 really has a lunar
"Moonshot" theme to it.
You'll notice that there's a lot of lunar crater theme,
both in the center console, in the gauge cluster.
Everywhere you look
there's this kind of space situation to it.
This "Space Oddity" that I think is kind of neat,
especially if you're a sci-fi fan.
But just the way all of these graphics look
is just extraordinary.
This is your pitch and roll angle.
Normally, in an off-road vehicle, this is two gauges.
One that shows you that way.
Here, they've combined it into something
that wouldn't be out of place
if you were controlling a spaceship,
relative to its surroundings.
This actually shows you your wheel articulation.
You see my right rear wheel is actually considerably lower
than my left rear wheel.
That's because of the way the vehicle is situated
off-road right now.
This is actually wheel torque, and individual wheels,
you can see exactly how much each wheel is getting.
Here's your G loads, your lockers.
You've got locking differentials front and rear.
The front differential is an actual mechanical
electronic locking differential.
In the rear, because this is a three motor vehicle,
it uses software to actually match the two electric motors.
So it's kind a virtual electronic locking differential.
But hey, you know what?
It still works.
But the most impressive part still
is this rear wheel steering.
It makes this thing feel so much more agile
than it really has any right to be.
It is super wide and it's heavy and you feel it.
But when you come up on a bend
and you can just swing yourself through it
and you feel the back end swing out so easily,
it's really astonishing.
I can't wait to see four wheel steering like this
appearing on more pickups and off-road SUVs.
I think it's gonna be a game changer.
On the road, there really is no disguising
the size and heft of this thing.
It is wide.
It fills up the entire lane,
but it feels really no different
than any of the other super large heavy duty trucks
that General Motors makes.
So it's not all that different in experience
than if you were driving a full sized HD pickup.
It is loud, however, surprisingly.
You always expect electric vehicles
to be really quiet and hushed.
This is not quiet and hushed.
And that's really because these tires are off-road tires.
They are very knobby and they are very aggressive
and they're great for going off-road.
But when you're on smooth Arizona asphalt like this,
it still sets up quite a lot of noise.
You're not getting any help
from these overhead panels either.
They are are plastic.
They are translucent.
They're letting in a good deal of wind noise,
and they shake a little bit off-road,
and they don't really provide much in the way of
either sound or light insulation
when you're on road as well.
I do really wish that they were opaque.
They are tinted and they are some kind of polycarbonate,
but if they were opaque,
I think it would feel a little bit more secure in here.
Otherwise, the sunshine is still beating down on you,
even if it's not imparting that much in the way of heat.
The interior in here looks really cool, I have to say.
They've done quite a job with it
in creating a futuristic style
of spaceship space, honestly.
The only problem is the material quality
isn't necessarily representative of the vehicle's price.
We know that GM knows how to do a stellar
$100,000 vehicle interior.
We've seen the latest Escalade.
It's fantastic.
This looks good, but it doesn't feel great.
There's a lot of hard, cheap feeling plastic
in various places.
One thing about this interior
is that it is really quite comfortable.
These seats are good sized,
they're upholstered in an interesting vinyl,
that again, doesn't necessarily feel like a $100,000 car.
Same with the odd wet suit material on the doors.
It's durable, but I don't know
that it necessarily feels all that luxurious.
One of the cooler aspects are all these details and buttons.
There are no touch panels in here.
These icons that you see along here,
they're not actually touch panels.
The switch bank below them
are these textured plastic switches.
And they look really cool, but again,
they feel kind of cheap.
But the thing is, when you push something,
say for your seat heaters,
you don't push the button for the seat heater.
You push the switch below it,
which then brings up two possible icons,
either a heat or cooling.
And then you either touch the heating
or the cooling one as needed.
So that's kind of neat.
As I mentioned before, you'll see a lot of "Moonshot"
themed things all the way throughout the vehicle,
from the craters and the gauges
to whenever you push the special Watts to Freedom mode,
you get a special screen on the center console
that makes it look like you're launching
off the surface of the moon into orbit.
The Watts to Freedom mode actually feels like
you're launching off the surface of a planet into orbit.
(Hummer revving)
Because that is one of the most extraordinary
acceleration moments I've ever had in an electric vehicle.
No vehicle this size should be that quick.
GMC says it'll do zero to 60 in about three seconds.
And for vehicle that weighs over 9,000 pounds,
that is just something that has to be experienced
to be believed.
Thankfully, it does have large brakes to stop it
from those kinds of speeds, but it also has a maximum speed
of just 106 miles an hour, which quite frankly,
you're never gonna go faster than that in America
anyway, in most places.
It's not necessarily how fast you can go,
but how fast you can get to how fast you can go.
That's where the Hummer EV really does impress.
Now, if you're more concerned with how far you can go
than how fast you can go,
the range on this model is, I believe, 329 miles,
which is more than the Rivian
and is more than the Ford F150 Lightning is supposed to be,
but it is still not a whole lot of range
for a battery this size.
It has over 200 kilowatt hours of battery storage capacity
in this thing, a 24 module Ultium battery.
That is huge.
And for it to only go 329 miles on a charge
really is indicative of how efficient the vehicle is,
which is to say really not very.
It's so heavy and so aerodynamically challenged
given its sheer bulk and size,
that that's really why you're not getting
super stellar range like you would see in,
say a Lucid or a Tesla.
Visibility out of this thing is mostly good.
The problem with it is the styling
of all Hummer vehicles has always been that kind of
military squat vehicle look.
In which case you've got a very squat windshield.
It is not very tall at all.
So when you're pulling up to stoplights,
it's the same problem you might have
on a Jeep Wrangler or a Ford Bronco.
You're actually ducking and looking underneath
the top of the windshield to see the lights above you.
But to the sides and to the rear, not so bad.
To its favor, it also has 18 different camera views
that are available.
So you can see to the front
and the sides and the back and underneath the vehicle.
And you can see underneath the vehicle
to the front tires to the rear tires.
It's even got a washer for the underbody camera
in case you get it muddy or dusty.
So you can still see where you're going
or what you might be rolling over.
It also has the trailering function camera.
So you can see the trailer behind you.
Or if you plug in some special equipment,
you can see in the trailer or even behind the trailer
or even make the trailer disappear on your screen.
Surprisingly, side winds don't really upset
the Hummer EV all that much,
despite it being an extremely tall SUV.
Its center of gravity is really quite low.
That's the big, heavy battery
that's in the dual layer module, very low in the vehicle.
So in terms of side winds, you're really not
being blown around on the highway at all.
So yes, it is expensive.
It costs over $112,000 new.
If you can even find one.
The Edition 1 models were sold out over a year ago.
So if you do find one in a dealership,
it's going to cost you significantly more
than sticker price, but future models are going to
be less expensive.
And yeah, it's heavy,
and yeah, it's got an enormous battery,
but again, future models of the new Ultium system
are going to have lesser batteries.
They're gonna have fewer motors.
They're going to be less expensive,
but they're still going to be extraordinarily capable,
both in on-road vehicles and in off-road vehicles.
But if you want the ultimate off-road super truck,
and you're cool with it not making noise
like a Ford Raptor or a Ram TRX,
quite honestly, this is the one to have.
It can do just so many extraordinary things.
And it does them really, really well.
If you'd like to learn more about the new
2023 GMC Hummer EV, you can look everything up on cars.com.