I am 5-foot-6 when I open the door of the 2025 GMC Hummer SUV. I grow to 6-foot-8 when I climb to peer into its cavernous interior, which is high-tech and leather-wrapped, and all mine for a week. I pass eight feet as I settle into the 12-way power heated and ventilated front seat. As I hit the start button and three motors producing 830 horsepower, klieg lights pan across my gargantuan back, and helicopters circle my head like gnats.
To say the 2025 GMC Hummer SUV makes you feel powerful is like calling a redwood forest some vegetation.
Outside military service, the name Hummer has always stood for a unique type of excess that seemed comical until you tried it. General Motors retired the name in 2010 when bills for the wars of the early 2000s were showing up in the mail, gas prices crested $2.70, and America felt a little chastised for its swagger.
It came back in the most unlikely of ways. Once the target of “gallons per mile” jokes, the Hummer is now an electric vehicle (EV).
Its mere existence should make you marvel. EVs are a relatively young technology, and GM is just getting its feet wet with them. A hulking off-roader with Formula 1-like acceleration, the ability to change height at the tap of a button, and a setting for driving sideways might seem like the sort of thing a company would only build after it had perfected the electric car, but it was actually the first thing GMC tried.
A week driving this improbable answer to a dare left me impressed with the Hummer as a piece of design and a hunk of Americana that, just maybe, points the way toward an end to the culture wars. Too much? Yes. But read on, and I’ll try to explain.
About Our Test Model
Our test model was the 3X model ($104,650) equipped with Meteorite Metallic gray paint ($625), an optional removable roof ($1,495), and the Extreme Off-Road Package ($9,995), which adds underbody skid plates, a pair of electronic locking differentials, mud tires, and underbody cameras that wash themselves. It retails for $119,060 after a $2,295 destination charge — yes, 148% of the median household income, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
Nobody said this was gonna come cheap.
Note that GMC also builds a pickup truck version of the Hummer EV, which is available with more power. That last part is almost unthinkable, but I can see the appeal of a truck bed.
The Hummer EV Looks Like a Hummer, Not an EV
Every vehicle that has ever had the Hummer name on it looks over-the-top, like the offensive lineman cousin to other dedicated off-roaders (we’re pretending the H3 didn’t happen, and you should, too).
The electric Hummer is no exception. Our test model rides on 35-inch tires — among the largest stock tires on any 2025 SUV. At nearly 87 inches wide without mirrors, it’s more than a half-foot wider than most full-size pickups.
You ride so high that you look city bus drivers in the eye and see down into the laps of other SUV drivers.
GMC did little to make the Hummer look like an electric vehicle. It’s as aerodynamic as a poorly thrown brick. Every design element is chosen for a rugged image. Big tow hooks in the front bumper make you wonder what, exactly, is showing up to tow this.
Snap-Together Tech Look, Moon Cartography Styling
Inside, you feel that width. A passenger had to lean toward the center of the SUV to work the big 13.4-inch central touchscreen comfortably.
Like many EVs, the center console is a floating shelf above a storage space. In the Hyundai Ioniq 6, it’s large enough for a decent-size purse. This holds entire paper grocery bags.
The cabin has every feature of a modern luxury car. However, the design scheme snaps them together like MOLLE accessories. The big central touchscreen and driver’s instrument screen look designed to snap off for safekeeping (they’re not).
It’s not all utilitarian, though. My tester’s white-over-black leather upholstery has style. GMC designers have worked in topographic maps as decorations. They’re not Denali this time. They show the moon’s Sea of Tranquility – a clever reference to the fact that GM built the lunar rovers used in the original Apollo missions.
My tester had the Infinity Roof, a top comprising four removable panels so that you can drive with a full roof, a partial roof, or none.
With the roof panels off, it’s fun, but you feel very on display. Everyone turns to look at this anyway, and now they can see the person driving it and hear the podcast they’re listening to. That’s true of any convertible, but this one demands everyone look.
If you’re an introvert who writes for a living, it’s awkward.
Stunningly Easy to Drive Anywhere
All that size probably has you thinking, “How hard is this thing to drive?”
The shocking answer is that it’s quite easy. You notice the bulk in that you sit over the heads of some sedan drivers, eye-to-eye with flabbergasted dump truck drivers. You don’t notice it when it comes to handling.
The Hummer SUV has nicely weighted steering. Intellectually, you know it’s wide. The average urban street lane is 10 to 11 feet wide. With mirrors, the Hummer is almost eight. But easy handling means it doesn’t feel that wide.
Its acceleration demands explanation. Maybe even some congressional hearings.
To get the most extreme version of go, you select “WTF” mode. Officially, GMC says, that stands for “Watts to Freedom.” You won’t shout “Watts to Freedom” when you feel it.
This SUV, with a curb weight of about 9,000 pounds (about 3.8 Miata roadsters), gets from zero to 60 mph in just 3.5 seconds. That’s faster than some versions of the Porsche 911. Yes, it weighs about 2.5 times what the Porsche does and keeps up with it in a straight line.
In day-to-day driving, however, the Hummer doesn’t feel overpowered. It also makes a faint strobing sci-fi noise far less obnoxious than the loudly fake sounds many of today’s EVs emit.
Off-Road Skills Like the Largest Mountain Goat
I took the Hummer down a few dirt roads after a snowstorm but didn’t get to take it into extreme off-road conditions. Should you need to, terrain-specific drive modes, two locking differentials, underbody cameras that show you the trail under the Hummer, and some of the best stock mud tires on any 2025 SUV should make it among the most sure-footed off-roaders built in 2025.
It might not fit down every trail. But it won’t fail to negotiate one for any other reason.
Then there’s the party trick. GMC’s “CrabWalk” mode enables the front and rear tires to turn together to angles up to 10 degrees at up to 20 mph. It doesn’t sound like much, but it feels almost like driving the car at a 45-degree angle to the roadway.
This could prove extremely useful off-road. GMC calls it a parking hack as well, but it does little to negate the fact that the car is almost as wide as a parking space.
Off the trail, CrabWalk is a party trick. But, well, does any car you have ever owned do a party trick? None of mine have.
Is This Zero Calorie Cake?
CrabWalk is the sort of thing an automaker does only when it wants to build an extreme vehicle capable of jaw-dropping things.
Ultimately, that is what the GMC Hummer EV is about. It’s the Final Boss of EVs. It out-accelerates the supercars of a generation ago, handles sand and snow and mud with little risk of getting stuck, turns heads in traffic, gives you a hardtop SUV and a springtime convertible, and, oh yeah, emits nothing from any tailpipe.
It has something to appeal to every side of the culture wars. I’d challenge any overpowered off-roader in it. But I’d also park it outside a Sierra Club meeting at a kombucha bar.
The Hummer is still a form of conspicuous consumption. True story: I tried plugging it into a conventional wall outlet instead of a dedicated EV charger when the battery read 30% on a Sunday at 2 p.m. It said it would be ready the following Saturday at 10:30 a.m.
But anyone looking to buy this likely has access to a home charger or the means to procure one.
Will the GMC Hummer EV end the culture wars? Well, no. The culture wars won’t end as long as there’s money to be made off making you imagine people and get mad at them. But maybe there is value in proving that something like this is possible.
Cards on the table — I’m not predisposed to like something this ostentatious. But I am predisposed to like cars that have personality and some sense of distinction. And there is no denying that this is one of the most distinct things on the road.
It’s surprisingly easy to live with day-to-day and might give my most conservative and liberal relatives something to agree on. For that reason alone, I’m glad it exists.
