John Ayodele of Nigeria recently became the proud owner of a used Hummer. He went through his daughter, a grad student living in Maryland, to buy it from a Perry Hall plumber for $24,500.
Ayodele, an engineering executive, has practical reasons for buying and shipping across the Atlantic a vehicle seen by many as an eco-villain. Nigeria's potholes are like lunar craters. And the truck could almost certainly plow through most log roadblocks laid out by highway bandits.
Too bad for Hummer there aren't more highwaymen out there. The once-fashionable General Motors brand is hurting big-time. New figures compiled by Autodata show it is the worst-selling automotive brand in America, with sales down 40 percent through June.
Hummers have long been the favorite whipping boy of environmentalists. Now with gas prices in the stratosphere, buyers are steering clear.
Yet Hummer still manages to retain its hard-core loyalists. They endure, or try to ignore, $120 gas station resupplies. They put up with occasional sneers from other drivers, whose resentment is now spiced with a devilish pleasure over what $4-a-gallon gas is costing unrepentant Hummer owners.
Despite it all, they'll love their Hummers come hell or higher fuel prices.
"People just understand the DNA ... its ruggedness, its ability to go almost anywhere," said Glen Peck, an avowed enthusiast with not one, but two, parked in his Annapolis driveway: a maroon H2 and its (somewhat) smaller sibling, the H3.
A director of the national Hummer Club, Peck just returned from a weekend off-roading in Pennsylvania. These events also bring out the H1s - the original Hummer, born in the 1990s and modeled after the military Humvees still on the job in Iraq and Afghanistan. (Humvee is the nickname given to the vehicle's tongue-twisting acronym HMMWV, which stands for High-Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicle.)
For much of the decade, Hummers carried the kind of cachet that made celebrities and athletes eager to climb inside (for one does not merely get into a Hummer). Sales jumped to around 20,000 in 2002 with the release of the H2 and then to over 50,000 in 2005 when the H3 rolled into showrooms.
But the backlash, always present, has risen amid skyrocketing gas prices and growing concern about global warming. To many, SUVs are oafishly absurd, and even in a parking lot jammed with Escalades and Expeditions, a Hummer stands out with its big, boxy profile. An unpopular war didn't exactly raise the Hummer's likability, given its military roots and bellicose bearing.
