Autoweek Article for Legends HUMMER

Welcome to Legends HUMMER of Scottsdale Arizona

Stone Cold Killer Truck: GM's li'l HUMMER H2 is one rock-solid SUV

By MARK VAUGHN

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 toward you in disbelief. A hundred years ago, somebody would draw on you 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.

"Timmy: The viscous center 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 beat the heck out of ya'. This would not deter you as you continued your argument with 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 oil filters and transmission cases, get a cage that allows handy service access while
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. Real four-wheeling like this is fun. 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 two opposite wheels for as long as it takes to get at least 100 pictures of yourself in there, then creeping slowly out of it, utilizing the H2's locking differentials to keep a measured amountof 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.