Hummer Car Manufacturers

Hummer can trace its roots back to the original "general purpose" four-wheel-drive utility vehicles produced for use in World War II by Willys-Overland, better known as the GP or Jeep. Willys-Overland was eventually bought by Henry J. Kaiser and renamed the Kaiser-Jeep Corporation and was then absorbed by American Motors Corporation. Under AMC, the division responsible for producing military trucks and city buses became known as AM General. After struggling financially along with the rest of AMC through the '70s and '80s, AM General was acquired by LTV Corporation, which continued using AM General for government contract work.

Hummer was a brand of trucks and SUVs, first marketed in 1992 when AM General began selling a civilian version of the M998 Humvee. In 1998, General Motors (GM) purchased the brand name and marketed three vehicles: the original Hummer H1, based on the military Humvee, as well as the H2 and H3 models that were based on smaller, civilian-market GM platforms.

In 1979 the army issued a set of specifications for a Jeep replacement referred to as the High Mobility Multi-purpose Wheeled Vehicle (HMMWV) or Humvee. AM General produced a prototype the following year and was eventually awarded the contract to deliver the first 55,000 HMMWVs in 1985. Although the HMMWV would see its first action in Panama in 1989, AM General, or more importantly, Humvee, wouldn't be a household name until viewers tuned in nationwide to see American troops traverse the Kuwaiti desert in HMMWVs during Operation Desert Storm in 1991.

Founded

1992

Headquarters

Detroit, Michigan, U.S.

Defunct

May 24, 2010

Website

http://www.hummer.com

The popularity of the military vehicle with civilians, especially movie star Arnold Schwarzenegger, who commissioned the first privately owned Humvee, prompted AM General to once again pursue producing a Humvee for civilian use; something the company had been considering since the late '80s. By 1992 a civilian version was finally available under the brand name Hummer.

AM General knew that the popularity of the Hummer could be tapped even further by incorporating the brand's iconic styling and brag-worthy trail capability into smaller vehicles, but it was in no position to tackle the expansion of the marque alone. Enter General Motors. GM bought the rights to the Hummer name in 1998 and handled marketing and distribution of the vehicles while AM General continued to build them.

The fruits of the collaboration between GM and AM General would begin to be harvested in 2000 at the Detroit Auto Show. The concept introduced by GM was codenamed Project Maria in honor of Schwarzenegger's wife. It would eventually go on sale in 2002 as the H2, prompting the renaming of the original civilian Humvee as the H1. The H2 was followed by a truck version, the H2 SUT, in 2004; H3 in 2006; and H3T (truck) in 2009. However, lagging sales and the global economic crisis has caused GM to announce that it is considering either selling or shuttering the Hummer brand.