GM has started producing the Hummer EV SUV

General Motors has started production on the Hummer EV SUV at its Factory Zero in Michigan, according to Nicole Schmitz, a spokesperson for the company. The Detroit Press reported Monday that customers could start receiving their orders by the end of Q1. That lines up with GM’s FAQ stating that the SUV will be available in “early 2023.”

I won’t blame anyone who’s thinking, “wait, haven’t they been making these for a while,” because GM started delivering the truck version of the Hummer EV, which sports a five-foot-long bed, in December 2021. In October 2022, the company announced that it had made 782 of the vehicles during 2022, and said it had around 90,000 reservations for both the truck and SUV versions. Last summer, The Wall Street Journal reported that GM was only making around 12 Hummer EVs a day.

The Hummers are massive vehicles; the truck’s release revealed that its battery alone weighed 2,923 pounds or almost as much as an entire Honda Civic. That fact was actually recently highlighted by Jennifer Homendy, chair of the National Transportation Safety Board, during a speech about how vehicles are getting bigger and heavier.

“I‘m concerned about the increased risk of severe injury and death for all road users from heavier curb weights and increasing size, power, and performance of vehicles on our roads, including electric vehicles,” she said before specifically calling out the Hummer’s 10,000-plus pound gross vehicle weight rating. (She also mentioned how electrified vehicles from Ford, Volvo, and Toyota were significantly heavier than their gas counterparts.)

That does make it slightly ironic, then, that GM issued a press release about how it’s donating proceeds from selling the first production Hummer SUV at auction to a charity called “Tread Lightly!” which aims to “balance the needs of the people who enjoy outdoor recreation with the need to maintain healthy ecosystems and thriving populations of wildlife across the nation.” While I’m definitely happy to hear that the non-profit will be getting $500,000, I don’t think anybody will be able to tread lightly in a Hummer EV SUV.