An unexpected contender has stomped its way into the Electric Vehicle space: GMC Hummer. The upcoming 2024 Hummer EV SUV is an extravagant entry to a market that seems to never cease to expand. From Subaru to Tesla, everyone is trying to turn their SUVs electric. 

In typical Hummer fashion, their addition is very, very over the top. It can go from 0 to 60 in 3.5 seconds, the interior looks like a spaceship, and it can do a kind of crab-walk—all while retaining the larger-than-life look and size of its predecessors. At the same, Hummer’s even trying to change up its manufacturing process. “Factory Zero,” where the vehicle will be produced, promises zero emissions and has even crafted a wildlife habitat. 

From an ethical standpoint, though, the new Hummer EV isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. It’s pretty and high-tech, for sure. The manufacturing process itself is free of direct emissions as well. The problem is, that is not all there is to ethical manufacturing. Conscious production isn’t just about reducing emissions, even if that’s the issue receiving all the attention. It’s about crafting conscientiously, reducing waste, minimalizing consumption, and increasing safety for everyone around you. 

The Hummer EV falls short in all these factors because of one big reason: weight. 

Weight and Safety

The average weight of an SUV is 2,000 to 6,000 pounds. The Hummer EV weighs in at 9,000. Accordingly, it’s bigger, too. Once you have that much more weight and size, everything becomes exaggerated.

Safer For You, but More Dangerous For Everyone Else

It’s true: bigger cars are safer for the person driving them. The problem is that bigger, heavier cars are more dangerous for everyone else. 

In car-on-car collisions, the physics behind this is obvious. A bigger, heavier car will maintain its momentum and literally plow through the smaller vehicle. One study found that odds of death in a car versus SUV collision were 7.6 times higher for the driver of the car. The more you scale up the difference in sizes, the more this will increase.

For pedestrians, it’s worse. A 2010 study found that pedestrians are 50% more likely to get killed when struck by SUVs, trucks, and minivans. Finally, there’s the matter of weight. A 9,000-pound vehicle is going to take longer to stop than a 3,000-pound one. That’s basic physics. As a result, it’s harder to avoid a collision.

Now, add the fact that this massive Hummer is not built with field of view in mind, and you have a recipe for disaster. 

Speed

While we’re talking about safety, it’s important to think about that earlier statistic—this thing goes from 0 to 60 in 3.5 seconds. That’s cool and all… but it’s entirely useless in any real-world situation. If anything, that only poses a huge risk. As it stands, “pedal error” (accidentally pressing the gas when you didn’t mean to, or when you meant to press the break) causes 16,000 accidents per year. Imagine a 9,000-pound SUV that can zip from 0 to 60 in the time it takes for the driver to realize he pressed the wrong pedal. 

Weight and Sustainability

“Reduce, reuse, recycle” is a sustainability mantra, but it’s often understood. The order is vital. When at all possible, you should avoid going down the list. The priority should always be on reduction.

It’s here that the Hummer EV SUV lets us down in so many ways.

On a fundamental level, this 9,000-pound monster truck is… well, 9,000 pounds. This means that it requires far more materials and work to produce than a regular SUV. A minimum of 3,000 pounds more materials—per car. Hummer’s all-electric pickupalready has 10,000 preorders. SUVs sell roughly twice as much as pickups which comes out to 60,000,000 extra pounds of material used. All these just so someone can have a big car. 

The problem compounds when you consider secondary materials, like the battery. Hauling a 9,000-pound car requires an equally powerful (and heavy) battery. While the reduction in emissions from electric vehicles does outweigh the environmental costs of mining these materials, that may no longer be the case if we’re having to jam so much into a single car. 

Then, there’s the problem of electricity. The go-go juice that makes your electric vehicle run, and that you get every time you charge it, must come from somewhere. In the U.S., 60% of energy generation comes from fossil fuels. When you have such an oversized vehicle, more electricity is required to power it. In other words, a vehicle twice as heavy will require roughly twice as much energy to go the same distance. This means that the Hummer’s size is wasting electricity that still comes from non-renewable sources.

Finally, we have road-wear. The heavier the vehicle, the more damage it does to the road. The more damage done to the road, the more often it needs to be repaired, complete with all the financial, environmental, and practical costs of those repairs.

An Empty Promise… For What?

So, the Hummer EV SUV is more dangerous and wasteful than its counterparts. But the bigger ethical problem here is that it’s more dangerous and wasteful for no good reason. There’s no reason to have a car that big and heavy. It’s not more practical or useful than the alternatives, and it certainly isn’t cheaper. If you want to buy a big, masculine American car, that’s fine. In fact, Ford’s F-150 has an electric version.

But the Hummer EV SUV misses out on fulfilling all its promises for no reason other than being able to say: “Yeah. My car is really big”.