Fuel Costs Fail To Drive Down Hummer Passion!
Battered By Critics, Gas Prices, These SUV Owners Have No Plan To Surrender
PINE GROVE, Pa. - They rumble in on treads called Super Swampers, wearing their hearts on their license plates.
“PLAYDRTY,” declares one behemoth from New York. “HUM THIS,” dares another, from Ohio.
The digital board fronting the Shell station at Exit 100 winks back: “Welcome Hummers!”
In the fading light, though, it’s impossible to ignore the sign at the Sunoco across the road: Diesel, $4.97 9/10 a gallon.
You’ve got to be tough to love a Hummer.
The soaring cost of feeding a vehicle that swallows a gallon every dozen miles is only part of it. Environmentalists, who’ve always had it in for owners, are winning mainstream converts. General Motors, which presided over Hummer’s transition from a badge of military bravado into a symbol of driveway excess, is looking to sell.
But tonight there’s no apologizing or self-pity in the ranks of Hummer die-hards. They’re here to goad machines that can top 5 tons over boulders the size of Smart cars, through stewpots of mud obscuring who-knows-what and across obstacle courses of stumps, logs and stones — it’s “like riding a slow-motion rollercoaster,” one says. Read more »
