By PHIL PATTON It has fought wars and crossed continents, mastered desert and jungle. But now that the Hummer--AM General's civilianized version of the military Hum-Vee--has come to the home front it must take on its toughest challenge: the infrastructure of urban America. It can do Kuwait, but can the Hummer do Manhattan? Hummers are replacing Range Rovers and Lambos in upscale garages, the folks in Mishawaka, Indiana, are out to prove the Hummer, which starts at $43,000, can follow the Jeep into mufti. About a third of Hummers go to oil wildcatters and uranium prospectors or, say, the Zimbabwe National Parks and Game Authority. But for civilians, the Hummer is a kind of hard rock sports car: the first sale was to Arnold Schwartzenegger, after all. It has a special appeal. "When a Hummer comes into a neighborhood," the company trumpets, "dogs bark and kids salute." In today's cities, at a time when New York is contemplating using Ford Explorers as taxi cabs, the Hummer also make a lot of sense. Think of the Hummer as a sports car with a sense of reality: owning the baddest SUV around may ultimately be not just more fun but more reasonable than subjecting a luxury sports sedan to rim rippling pothole and alignment wracking cobblestone. To find out, your correspondent tested the toughest vehicle he had driven since the XM-1 tank on one of the most inhospitable landscapes in the world, where thousands of high powered armored vehicles with Islamic fanatics at the wheel come charging at you--in Manhattan, that is, where roo-barred Caprice cabs are hurled through the streets by recent immigrants from Pakistan. The civilian Hummer offers more comfortable seats, cruise control, and central locking. With power steering and automatic transmission controlling its big V-8 diesel or gasoline engine, made by GM, it can clear sixteen inches, twice the height of most SUVs, and carry up to 4000 pounds. The new turbodiesel option gives you added torque, but acceleration is limited. Sound is not: floor it and the Hummer raises a racket worthy of John Gotti. Thrown into the Mad Max game of New York driving, The Hummer drives much more nimbly than its 78 inch width suggests. Its imposing size deters opportunistic lane poachers. Even taxis grow respectful when faced with the prospect of a hip check from a Hummer. Even at about 6000 pounds, a Hummer has all the agility you need for the amusement park of Manhattan's old West Side highway, where they seem to shift construction barriers weekly just to keep drivers alert, the way they move the pins for later rounds of PGA tournaments to challenge golfers. When the taxi suddenly decides to turn in front of you in Times Square at rush hour, four wheel disc brakes grip quickly and the Hummer rocks impatiently on its big coil springs for a few seconds, like a boxer bouncing on the balls of his feet. To provide the Hummer's height and clearance, the wonderful machinery of its three ranges of gears resides up inside the passenger cabin, producing a vast mesa of unused space that lends an eerie distance to conversations with your passengers. The controls are plain but workable, save the horn, misplaced on a stick off the wheel, where you must slap it with indignant palm rather than hammer it with the base of the fist--the instinct of the urban jungle. Books · Recent
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