Hummer

Winning the lottery is something that everyone has dreamt about. Even those who stand up proudly and announce "I have never bought a ticket!", as if this proclamation of financial chastity will win them a shiny bicycle that only rides to heaven, have at some point said, "If I won the lottery, I'd do/buy/go ______." One thing you never hear is an honest answer from a complete addict. Someone who buys multiple tickets, every week of every year, thinking that their ship is right around the corner of that 7-11 checkout counter. I bet if you took a survey on the reason for the secrecy, the box, "I don't want to total up how much I've wasted." would get a lot of check-marks.

To point out how much one can waste on this game of (there's-almost-no) chance, students from the R.I. School of Design created an exhibit called "Ghost of a Dream". It's a collection of sculptures constructed out of old lottery tickets (like this full-size Hummer H3) meant to depict the purchases of potential winners. It's like being scolded by your parents if they had both a master's in sarcasm and art. Ouch. Make the jump for the story.

Regardless of what your opinion of the Hummer H2 may be, we can personally verify that the larger of the two models offered by GM’s soon-to-be-euthanized in-your-face pickup and SUV brand has legitimate off-roading chops. Of course, there are only so many custom touches that can be made to this leviathan, and over the years pretty much every single one has been. What hasn’t the aftermarket done to the H2? If you answered bolt on a quartet of tank-style tracks in place of wheels and gussy up the exterior in a crypto-WWII bomber motif, give yourself a gold star, though even that theme has now brought to life by Germany’s Geiger Cars.

The most obvious change, of course, is the set of four Mattracks 88M1-A1 rubber tracks. At 15.75” wide and 59” long, the tracks serve up superb traction on just about any surface. Wolfgang Blaube, editor of the German car magazine Autobild took it out on the snow-covered Nürburgring Nordschleife in the middle of winter and remarked that the experience opened his eyes to “a new dimension of fun.”

Like many brands currently in automotive limbo, the future of Hummer is unclear. China's Sichuan Tengzhong Heavy Industrial Machinery Co. Ltd apparently has some big plans but nobody knows what those may be. Right now there is no pipeline and product development is non-existent.

What we do know is that Hummer's new owner wants to focus on environmentally-friendly vehicles with a smaller footprint than today's behemoths. As such, a Romanian designer named Andrus Ciprian has created some renderings of what a potential Tengzhong-produced SUV might look like. His Hummer HB Concept is a unique and engaging proposal for the future of the brand's lineup.