General Motors started production Monday of the second electric vehicle in the Hummer family: The 2024 GMC Hummer SUV. That vehicle will hit dealership lots later in the first quarter.
GM’s Global Vice President of Buick GMC Duncan Aldred sat down with the media Monday as the first Hummer SUV rolled off the line at Factory Zero in Detroit and Hamtramck.
Aldred said GMC has about 90,000 reservations for the Hummer EVs, with about 60,000 of them for the pickup and the balance for the SUV. Here’s a snapshot of what he had to say.
When will GMC restart taking orders for the Hummer EVs?
Aldred declined to specify when GMC will reopen the order banks for the vehicles. With 90,000 reservations to fill now, that amount will take GMC’s production of the vehicles through this year and well into 2024.
Also, GM has just one of its Ultium Cells LLC battery plants operational at the moment and that’s the one in Lordstown, Ohio. While that factory has capacity to meet GM’s battery production needs, Aldred said, GM still requires strategic planning as to which electric vehicles get those battery cells until the two other Ultium Cells plants it is building come online.
No price cuts on GMC’s electric trucks
As the Free Press recently reported, when electric carmaker Tesla announced broad price cuts to its vehicles, experts predicted an EV price war. On Monday, Ford Motor obliged. It said it would reduce the price of the 2023 Mustang Mach-E from $600 to $5,900 depending on the model.
But Aldred said don’t look for GMC to be lowering the price of the GMC Hummer EV pickup or the Hummer SUV any time soon. According to Kelley Blue Book, the 2024 Hummer EV SUV starts at $79,995 for the EV2 trim, $89,995 for the EV2X trim, $99,995 for the tri-motor EV3X model, and $105,595 for the Edition 1. The 2023 Hummer EV pickup starts at $98,400.
You can have any color, as long as it’s white
Currently, the Edition 1 of the SUV will all come in a matte green. All the 2023 first-edition Hummer pickups already on roads are in white, Aldred said.
“It was a pretty conscious decision to go with the white and I do believe it’s really made it into this iconic vehicle that it is,” Aldred said. “It was a culmination of a marketing decision and, at the time, because of a two-year product development cycle, you try to keep things as simple as possible.”
But that will soon change. When GMC starts building the 3X edition of the pickup soon, there will be other colors available for it.
He said as model years progress, more colors will be added to both the Hummer EV pickup and Hummer SUV until GMC can offer a “pretty normal selection.”
The first production Hummer sells for $500,000
GMC sold the the first production 2024 Hummer Edition 1 SUV over the weekend at the Barrett-Jackson Auction in Scottsdale, Arizona, for $500,000. All of the money will go to Tread Lightly!, a nonprofit dedicated to promoting outdoor recreation through stewardship and educational programs.
In March 2021, the first 2022 GMC Hummer EV pickup sold for a whopping $2.5 million at the 2021 Barrett-Jackson auction.
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Contact Jamie L. LaReau: jlareau@freepress.com. Follow her on Twitter @jlareauan. Read more on General Motors and sign up for our autos newsletter. Become a subscriber.