Hummer sale agreed

After the official bankruptcy of GM was declared yesterday, GM has announced that it has also reached agreement to shed its troublesome (certainly in these eco-friendly times) Hummer operation.

GM are reporting that they have reached a ‘Memorandum of Understanding’  with an unnamed buyer to take Hummer of their hands later in the year. MOUs are not the strongest tool in the arsenal when a sale is being arranged, which tends to indicate that either the buyer likes the idea but won’t commit yet, or they are still in ‘Fund-Raising’ mode.

So who are the likely buyers? GM aren’t saying, but our money is on the Chinese, the Indians or the Russians. It is really going to be an emerging market that takes Hummer on – it seems highly unlikely that any major motor manufacturer in the West would want the image that Hummer exudes now the world is turning its back on gas-guzzling monsters.

But in places where fuel is relatively cheap; where roads are poor and where there is no real eco-ethos in play, Hummer could be a Halo marque for a car maker looking to enter the mainstream with a ‘Known’ marque.

The only spanner in the works for this theory is that GM says that the new owners will be guaranteeing that no US manufacturing jobs will be lost, and nor will the US dealer network be affected. It will be closing the Hummer operation in South Africa (which builds Hummers for RHD markets) but apart from that nothing will change. Which seems to be at odds with a non-US buyer.

So we may yet see the Hummer Concept we saw last year – the Hummer HX Concept – and development of the current H1, H2 and H3 models.

Who knows, maybe the ‘Governator’ has dug deep to buy his favourite toy and make them all run on Hydrogen!